290 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 14:2 Religion and the Order of Nature by Seyyed Hossein Nasr. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1 9 9 6 , 3 1 0 ~ ~ . 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 stud- ies of nature. Professor Nasr brings together a breath-taking depth of knowledge in a single volume-he covers the fields of metaphysics and comparative reli- gion, traditional cosmology and modem philosophies of nature, as well as the history of science and the rise of secularism and humanism. The book is espe- cially 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 mod- e m man’s misguided search for the infinite in a finite world. Rather than satis- fying 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, giv- ing 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 sen- sibility 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 objec- tive 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 desacral- ization of nature. At the root of both errors is an attitude which creates an inter- nal world of reason cut off from both the intellect and Revelation, and an exter- nal world cut off from its spiritual significance as a sign from God. Book Reviews 29 1 The book consists of eight chapters, each supported with copious references and notes which both substantiate the arguments made and introduce the reader to spiritual works that transcend the quantitative perspective. As Kazemi, a scholar of comparative religion and traditional teachings, notes, “Professor Nasr meets the most exacting standards of scholarship and satisfies the thirst of the seeker: at a time when ever-increasing numbers are being driven by the ravages of the environmental crisis to reconsider such conventionally hallowed ideas as ‘progress’ and ‘development’, this book will be of the utmost significance in reorienting them towards the realm of traditional intellectuality that can alone provide a meaningful critique of modern society.” The following overview of each chapter also draws from Kazemi’s valuable commentary on Professor Nasr’s book The opening chapter, “Religion and Religions,” addresses the question of how to study religions, a necessary prelude since the purpose of the book is to “understand the relation of religion to the order of nature on a global scale rather than from the perspective of a single tradition.” (p. 10) First, Professor Nasr examines the way in which religions differ with respect to their outer forms, while being united in respect to their source and substance. Many of his readers will be familiar with this perennialist thesis that each religion contains the Truth and a means for attaining the Truth, while emphasizing a particular aspect of Truth in conformity with the spiritual and psychological needs of the humanity for whom it is destined. Professor Nasr draws an image from the world of nature to explain this. The Ultimate Reality that is the origin of the sacred is likened to a mighty spring gushing forth atop a mountain, It gives rise to cascades of water that descend with ever-greater dispersion from each side, each cascade symbolizing all the grades of reality and the levels of cosmic, and, by transposition, metacosmic reality of a particular religious uni- verse. Yet all the cascades issue from a single Spring and the substance of all is ultimately nothing but the water which flows from the Spring at the mountaintop, the Reality which is the alpha of all sacred worlds and also the omega to which all that is within their embrace returns. (p. 12) The second chapter on “The Order of Nature” assesses the order of nature from the point of view of these different religious traditions which emphasize different aspects of the Truth. Professor Nasr exhibits an astonishing depth of knowledge on the religions of the world, selecting perspectives that indicate the essential elements of each. He provides a breath-taking survey of the different religious landscapes, covering the Primal religions, Shamanism and the American Indian traditions, Taoism and Confucianism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, the Greek religions, and finally Abrahamic monotheisms. He calls the convergences which bring these different traditions together the “uni- versal heritage of the religious view of the order of nature,” which is an aspect of the “perennial cosmology.” Professor Nasr beautifully integrates these con- vergent principles, and explains them in the following way: The first is that the order of nature is related to an order “beyond” itself, to what we might call “spiritual principles.” Traditional religions agree that the reality of nature has a significance beyond its appearance, that there is a “sacred” quality within MtWe. . . Second, the order of nature has a purpose, a meaning, and this meaning has spiritual and moral 292 The American Joumal of rslamic Social Sciences 142 significance for human beings. Third, the human and natural orders are intertwined in a bi-unity in such a way that their destinies are inter- related not only here and now but even in that ultimate state that is eschatological. Fourth, the laws of man and the laws of nature are not totally distinct but are again closely interrelated and in some tradi- tions the same, as in such key concepts as Tao. rta, al-Shari’ah and sunnah @. 65) Given this spiritual norm, Professor Nasr discusses “Philosophy and the Misdeeds of Philosophy” in the following chapter. He charts the development of western philosophy, locating the rebellion of the post-medieval West against the rraditid Christian view of man and nature. He discusses how the positive elements of Greek schools of philosophy could easily be ammodated within the Abrahamic religions, but points to the seeds of rationalism in its later stages which came to fruition during the Enlightenment and Renaissance. The Thomistic view of nature against which philosophy in this period rebelled was a profoundly religious one, although it did not stress symbolism. Many writers now suggest that one should not blame the Renaissance for the later abuses inflicted on nature in the name of science because nature was still viewed as divine (though purely by sentiment) at that time. Professor Nasr responds deci- sively by demonstrating the futility of attempting to make nam holy outside of the great religions. He writes that this sentimental Renaissance approach to nature did not lead to arediscovery of the sacramental character of nature because the conception of nature as “divine” took place for the most part outside the sacred world of Christianity and was independent of a revealed uni- verse of meaning. . . cut off from the protection of a living tradition, and this gave way very rapidly during the latter years of the Renaissance to a mechanistic view of the world dominated by mathe- maria. @. 101) Professor Nasr then presents the decline into a mechanistic view of the world, both natural and social. From the Copernican revolution to Cartesian dualism, andfromComteanpositivism to Darwinian evolutionism, he surveys the decline of the West into irlcseasingly gross forms of materialism. However, eventually he strikes a positive note with a summary of the perennialist school’s view of nature. drawing primarily from writings on the cosmic and natural order by Frithpf Schuon. The next two chapters on the “Scientific Revolution” and the “Tragic Consequences of Humanism in the West” continue the incisive d y s i s of the post-medieval worldview deviation. Regardins the defining characteristic of the new science after the Renaissance, Professor Nasr writes that it marked the first occasion in human history when a human collectivity com- pletely replaced the religious understanding of the order of nature for one that was not only nomligious but that also challenged some of the most badi tenets of the religious perspective. @. 130) While all the previous sciences of nature were intrinsically related to the meeaphysical, cosmological, and ethical principles of the traditions in which they developed, the new science knew no bounds and claimed for itself totality, Book Reviews 293 reducing all of d t y to mechanistic and mathematical models with raw empir- ical data limited to the terrestrial plane. Although Pmfessor Nasr does not deny the validity of the findings of this science, he argues that this knowledge of the “quantitative face” of nature came at the expense of its “spiritual face” in which all things turn to worship God: Henceforth as long as only the quantitative face of nature was consid- ered as real, and the new science was seen as the only science of na~e, the religious meaning of the order of nature was irrelevant, at best an emotional and poetic response to “matter in motion.” (p. 143) Discussing current developm~nts in science, Professor Nasr reveals the cracks forming in its edifice and the openings leading to the religious understanding of nature. He stresses that the only way to establish a sacred science (or to “Islamize knowledge,” using the terminology of this journal) is to f m t create “space” for it by removing errors which are obstacles to it. He maintains that this can only come about by understanding the modem scientific worldview and the manner in which it has eclipsed the spiritual significance of nature. The chapter “Scientific Revolution” applies the sword of Truth to create this “space,” and is essential reading for t h e who are interested in the “Islamization of knowl- edge.” The following chapter, “Tragic Consequences of Humanism in the West,” seals this discussion on the rise of the scientistic worldview and its relationship to viewing man solely within his ternstrial context. Since man without God is not fully man, secular humanism can only give rise to the infra-human. In fact, he opens this chapter with a forceful reminder of what accompanied this new “humanism,” writing that it is not easy to understand how fewer than two hundred men from western Spain could defeat the entire Incan Empire in Peru and bring about the death of 4 million of 8 million inhabitants of that land in a decade, while debating whether the people the invaders were slaughtering had souls and whether or not they were human. (p. 163) Another key point made in this chapter relates to how the new conception of man inverted the relationship between being and doing. Whereas the traditional religious view always maintained that being determines action, humanists such as Pico asserted that “the being of man follows from his doing.” that being was contingent on action. Professor Nasr comments: He (Pico) thus stated philosophically the thesis of the primacy of action over contemplation and doing over being, which characterizes modem man and which has been of the greatest consequence for the destruc- tion of the world of nature. The unlimited energy of a civilization turned totally outward to remold the natural world in complete ‘W- dom”. . . is at the heart of the relentless activity of modern man in the destruction of the natural environment vis-a-vis which he cannot sim- ply “be” but toward which he must act aggressively to change and uansform it. @. 174) The next chapter, “The Rediscovery of Nature: Religion and the Environmental Crisis,” provides an overview of the various responses from 294 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 142 Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and other religious thinkers to the environmental cri- sis in the last several decades. It is followed by the chapter “Wisdom of the Body” which provides a profound analysis of the correspondence between the macroasm of nature and the mimcosm of the body. This may be an area of discovery for many readers, and Professor Nasr begins with the premise that the body is sacred according to all traditional religions. He argues that the profane treatment of nature by modem man also applies to the desacralization of the human body, which is hivialized in the reductionist approach of modem medi- cine. Therefore, attempts to oppose the tendencies responsible for the environ- mental crisis must include an appreciation of the inner environment that is the human body. Professor Nasr substantiates this for the different religious tradi- tions, and closes the chapter with an inspiring conclusion: ~d rediscover the body as the abode of the Spirit, worthy of Resurrection before the Lord, and intimate companion in the soul‘s journey in this world, sacred in itself and in the life which permeates it, is to rediscover at the same time the sacredness of nature. It is to reestablish our link with the plants and animals, with the streams, mountains and the stars. It is to experience the presence of the Spirit in the physical dimension of our existence as well as in the world of nature to which we are linked both physically and spiritually, through our bodies as well as our souls and the Spirit which is reflected in both our bodies as the temples of God and the world of nature as the theater of theophanies and mirror of Divine Creativity. (p. 262) The final chapter, “Religion and the Resacralization of Nature,’’ eloquently relates these spiritual and ethical principles to the current environmental crisis. The chapter makes one aware of the inadequacies of current “solutions” which are not rooted in the traditional worldview. Indeed, the very idea of a “new ide- ology” betrays the individualistic and anti-traditional attitude which generated the problem in the first place. Professor Nasr, on the other hand, seeks to resus- citate the approach centered on the Absolute and Heaven. This alone guarantees that man can live in harmony with earth. As pointed out earlier, the environ- mental crisis is the result of a spiritual crisis within man, and only by being cen- tered on the Absolute can man be taught the virtues of restraint and moderation: it is only traditional religions, with their roots sunk in the Divine and their means of directing the soul to its ultimate goal, that can provide a real cure for the illusion of a centerless soul seeking the Infinite in the multiplicity of nature and the Absolute in its circumferential mode of existence. Only religion can discipline the soul to live more ascetical- ly, to accept the virtue of simple living and frugality as ornaments of the soul, and to see such sins as greed for exactly what they are. (p. 272) Religions also provide the ritual power to affect the cosmos, an idea which is integral to all major traditions. Thus, Professor Nasr argues that religion must play a critical role in curing the imbalances and disharmonies in man’s relation- ship to the environment on three levels: the plane of ethics of the individual, the plane of intellectual thought and the resacralization of nature, and the plane of Book Reviews 295 the cosmos and the spiritual ambiance created by the performance of religious rites. Professor Nasr is to be congratulated on this immense work which is a land- mark in the resurgence of a sacred science on the religious order of nature. In presenting the religious view of the world, he makes clear the spiritual crisis that is the origin of the modem environmental crisis, and brings additional evidence to cast light on the unity of religions and spiritual thought. The book is both comprehensive and profound. Most importantly, it is spiritually rewarding, breaking the idols of the secular mind which are suffcxating illusions, and clar- ifying the path of ascent to contemplating the order of nature which an ayah or symbol that leads to God. Professor Nasr Arif Professor of Political Science and Economics School of Islamic and Social Sciences Leesburg, VA 1. Reza Shah-Kazemi, a review of Religion and the Order of Nature. Sophia: A 2. Ibid, p. 127. Journal for Traditional Studies Winter (1996): 125.