Seyyed Hossein Nasr

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Seyyed Hossein Nasr is an Iranian philosopher, born in Tehran on 7 April 1933, a leading living exponent of what is called the Traditionalist or Perennialist school — the claim that the world’s great religions are so many authentic expressions of a single sacred truth, the sophia perennis, and that the modern West has lost the means even to recognize it. He came to that claim by an unusual road. The son of Seyyed Valiallah Nasr, a physician and educator close to the Iranian court, he was sent west as a boy, schooled in New Jersey, and admitted to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as the first Iranian undergraduate there. He went to study physics, expecting the new science to answer the questions that pressed on him about the nature of reality. It did not. A meeting with Bertrand Russell, then lecturing at MIT, convinced him that physics as practiced could neither tell him what physical reality is nor touch the metaphysical questions he cared about; he turned, alongside his degree, to the history and philosophy of science under Giorgio de Santillana, and to the metaphysics of the medieval and ancient worlds. He took his physics degree in 1954, a master’s in geology and geophysics, and then went to Harvard for a doctorate in the history of science and learning, finishing in 1958. He had meant to write under George Sarton, the founder of the modern history of science; Sarton died before the dissertation began, and Nasr completed it under the Arabist Hamilton Gibb and the historian I. Bernard Cohen. That dissertation became his first major book, An Introduction to Islamic Cosmological Doctrines (1964) — a study of how Islamic thinkers read the cosmos as a hierarchy of meaning rather than a machine.

The career that followed ran across two worlds. Nasr returned to Iran in 1958 and rose quickly at Tehran University, holding a chair, the deanship of the faculty of letters, and a vice-chancellorship; from 1972 to 1975 he served as chancellor of Aryamehr University of Technology. In 1974, at the request of the Empress Farah Pahlavi, he founded and led the Imperial Iranian Academy of Philosophy in Tehran, building it into one of the most active centers of philosophical work in the Islamic world and gathering there, among others, the French Iranist Henry Corbin and the Japanese scholar Toshihiko Izutsu — the intellectual setting that Corbin’s own reconstruction of Iranian Islamic philosophy helped define. The revolution of 1979 ended that life. Nasr was abroad when the monarchy fell; he did not return, losing his home and a celebrated personal library, and remade his career a second time in the United States — briefly at the University of Utah and at Temple University, and since 1984 as University Professor of Islamic Studies at George Washington University.

The line of Guénon — rooted in Islam

His intellectual lineage is explicit, and he has never disguised it. He places himself in the succession of René Guénon, Frithjof Schuon, and Ananda Coomaraswamy — the thinkers who, earlier in the twentieth century, argued that behind the surface differences of religions lies a perennial wisdom, and that the disenchantment of the modern world is not progress but loss. Nasr was initiated into Schuon’s Maryamiyya, the Sufi order Schuon founded out of the Shādhiliyya-ʿAlawiyya line, and counts Schuon’s reading of the transcendent unity of religions as formative. Yet his distinctive contribution was to take a current that Guénon had assembled in France out of Vedanta, Sufism, and Taoism and to root it back in Islam — to argue the Traditionalist case not from a synthetic primordial Tradition but from within a living religion and its own metaphysical heritage.

That heritage is, above all, Persian. Nasr brought to Western readers a Persian philosophical canon that orientalism had largely passed over in favor of the Sufi poets. There is the Sufism of Ibn ʿArabī, whose doctrine of the unity of being — that all that exists is the self-disclosure of the one Real — supplies the metaphysical grammar of his whole project, and the love-poetry of Rūmī, read not as lyric ornament but as realized knowledge. There is the Illuminationist philosophy of Suhrawardī, executed at Aleppo in 1191, who recast metaphysics as a science of light and a graded hierarchy of luminous intelligences. And there is the later figure Nasr did most to introduce to the West: Mulla Sadra, the seventeenth-century Shīʿī philosopher of Shiraz whose transcendent theosophy (al-ḥikma al-mutaʿāliya) fused the rational Islamic philosophy of the falāsifa, the illuminationism of Suhrawardī, the gnosis of Ibn ʿArabī, and Shīʿī theology into a single system organised around the primacy and gradation of being. Sadra had been almost unknown outside the Persian madrasas; Nasr presented him, with Corbin and Izutsu, as one of the great metaphysicians of the post-classical Islamic world, and as evidence that Islamic philosophy did not die with Averroes but flowered on in the East. He understands these traditions not as historical curiosities but as living forms of a knowledge that is at once intellectual and contemplative — a knowledge meant to transform the knower, not merely to inform him.

Sacred science and the disenchanted world

The recurring target of his work is modern science taken as a complete account of reality. Nasr argues that the cosmos was once read as a tissue of symbols pointing beyond itself — that nature was a scientia sacra, a sacred science, a book whose forms disclosed the divine — and that the modern sciences, by reducing nature to quantity and mechanism, severed knowledge from its sacred source and left the natural world mute. This was not for him an abstract complaint. In a series of lectures at the University of Chicago in 1966, published as The Encounter of Man and Nature: The Spiritual Crisis of Modern Man (1968), he traced the ecological crisis to a metaphysical error — the desacralisation of nature — and did so before the environmental movement had a vocabulary for it, several months before Lynn White, Jr.’s widely cited essay on the religious roots of the ecological crisis appeared in Science. The diagnosis became the center of his thought.

It received its fullest statement in his 1981 Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh — Nasr was the first Muslim invited to give that long-running series — published as Knowledge and the Sacred. There he set the desacralisation of knowledge against its possible resacralisation: the modern disenchantment of the world as a wound that the perennial wisdom of the traditions might still heal. He has expanded the argument since across a large body of work — Three Muslim Sages (1964) on Avicenna, Suhrawardī, and Ibn ʿArabī, Ideals and Realities of Islam (1966), Religion and the Order of Nature (1996, his Cadbury Lectures), and as editor-in-chief of The Study Quran (2015) — more than fifty books in all, translated across the Islamic, European, and Asian languages.

It is a position held with conviction, and it is contested. The same critical scholarship that reads Guénon’s primordial Tradition as a modern construction — Mark Sedgwick’s Against the Modern World (2004), Wouter Hanegraaff’s account of “religionism” in the academy — presses the perennialist case at its seam: that the Traditionalist account flattens real and irreducible differences between religions into a unity the traditions themselves did not assert, and that its picture of an undivided premodern wisdom is itself a modern artefact, fitted most easily to traditions whose own apophatic vocabulary already resembles Neoplatonism and forced upon those that resist it. Nasr’s reply, characteristic of the school, is that the critique mistakes its object — that the contextualist objection touches only the discursive descriptions of metaphysical realities, not the realities the descriptions point toward — a move that is internally coherent and that depends, as its critics note, on granting the very metaphysical premises in dispute. Neither side need be adjudicated here for the shape of the disagreement to be clear: it is the old question of whether the likeness across traditions is discovered or produced.

Scholarship

Nasr is both a primary source for the Traditionalist current and a major subject of academic study, and the literature divides accordingly. His own corpus is the first body of evidence; the autobiographical essay “In Search of the Sacred” opens the volume devoted to him in the Library of Living Philosophers series — The Philosophy of Seyyed Hossein Nasr (vol. XXVIII, eds. Lewis E. Hahn, Randall E. Auxier, and Lucian W. Stone, Jr.; Open Court, 2001), in which thirty-three critical essays are answered point by point by Nasr himself, the standard scholarly forum for assessing a living philosopher. The anthology The Essential Seyyed Hossein Nasr, edited by his former student William C. Chittick (World Wisdom, 2007), gathers his most representative essays. For the broader movement, Mark Sedgwick’s Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century (Oxford University Press, 2004) remains the standard external history, placing Nasr in the apolitical, contemplative wing of the school distinct from its radical-political lineage; the genealogy and critique of the perennialist thesis itself is treated under Traditionalism and perennialism and the Renaissance coinage under Agostino Steuco. The Knowledge and the Sacred text remains in print from the State University of New York Press. The substrate of Nasr’s Persian canon — the Akbarian and Illuminationist sources he expounded — is mapped in the site’s Library, where the Tarjumán al-Ashwáq of Ibn ʿArabī sits in Nicholson’s 1911 edition alongside al-Ghazālī’s Niche for Lights.

What makes Nasr unusual among scholars of esoteric thought is that he is a subject of it as much as a student of it. He writes from inside a Sufi commitment, presenting metaphysics as something to be realized rather than only described, and he is read at once as an academic authority on Islamic philosophy and as a contemporary teacher of the perennial outlook. The two roles do not always sit easily together, and the tension is much of what his work is about.

→ In the library: Al-Ghazālī — The Niche for Lights (1924) · Ibn ʿArabī — The Tarjumán al-Ashwáq (1911)

→ Related: Neoplatonism · Gnosis · Chishti Sufism · Comparative Religion Eranos · Rene Guenon · Ananda Coomaraswamy · Traditionalism Perennialism · Suhrawardi · Rumi · Islamic Philosophy · Sufism · Islam · Akbarian Sufism Wahdat Al Wujud · Iranian Islamic Philosophy Corbin · Comparative Mysticism