Religion & the Order of Nature: The 1994 Cadbury Lectures at the University of Birmingham

By Seyyed Hossein Nasr

Book Overview

The current ecological crisis is a matter of urgent global concern, with solutions being sought on many fronts. In this book, Seyyed Hossein Nasr 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. What is needed, he believes, is the recovery of the truth to which the great, enduring religions all attest; namely that nature is sacred.

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. His goal 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. Each tradition, Nasr shows, has a wealth of knowledge and experience concerning the order of nature. The resuscitation of this knowledge, he argues, would allow religions all over the globe to enrich each other and cooperate to heal the wounds inflicted upon the Earth.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 019510823X
• ISBN13: 9780195108231
• Release Date: September 1996
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Length: 320 Pages
• Weight: 1.02 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.1" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

The Resacralization of Nature

Seyyed Hossein Nasr was among the first contemporary scholars to bring our attention to the sacred traditional understanding of nature and critique modern thought and science that reduces the earth to quantity alone. In "Religion and the Order of Nature" Nasr brings to light the various traditional cosmologies in the world's religions through which the single Metaphysical Principle shines. Nasr also discusses the function of the human being as the imperative link between Heaven and earth. I highly recommend this book for anyone who is concerned with the environmental crisis and wants to regain a vision of the sacred in the theophany that is nature. I have not encountered a more erudite, inspired, and compassionate defense of nature, with the exception of Nasr's almost prophetic "Man and Nature" (1968).