Desacralization of knowledge

The theme of desacralization frequently appears among Traditionalist writers, starting with French metaphysician René Guénon, who earlier spoke of "the limitation of knowledge to its lowest order."

[7][8] According to Nasr, desacralization of knowledge is one of the most significant aspects of secularism, which he defines as "everything whose origin is merely human and therefore non-divine and whose metaphysical basis lies in [its] ontological hiatus between man and God".

[19] According to Nasr, it is the post-medieval process of secularization and a humanism that have eventually forced the separation of knowledge from being and intelligence from the Sacred, which "is both the Knower and the Known, inner consciousness and outer reality".

According to this viewpoint, since modern science has rejected the notion of a hierarchy of being, scientific theories and discoveries are no longer capable of appreciating the truths that belong to a higher order of reality.

This perspective maintains that modern science has lost its symbolic spirit and the transcendental dimension because it has repudiated the role of intellect in pursuing knowledge and truth by adopting a purely quantitative method.

[30] According to Nasr, the rationalists and skeptics of ancient Greek philosophical traditions played a major role in the process of desacralization by reducing knowledge either to ratiocination or to cognitive exercise.

[33] The process, however, reached its climax in the thought of René Descartes,[34] "the father of modern Western philosophy," who "made thinking of the individual ego the center of reality and criterion of all knowledge".

Nasr contends that epistemology since Descartes has taken an increasingly reductionist trajectory in which the traditional doctrine of knowledge rooted in intellection and revelation was replaced by an idolatry of reason.

This situation further deteriorated into the Hegelian and Marxist dialectics, as they denied that there is anything immutable behind the appearance, and this loss of the sense of permanence was characteristic of mainstream thought of modern Western philosophy.

[39]One "powerful instrument" of desacralization in history includes the theory of evolution,[40] which according to Nasr "is a desperate attempt to substitute a set of horizontal, material causes in a unidimensional world to explain effects whose causes belong to other levels of reality, to the vertical dimensions of existence".

[41] He says the theory of evolution, and its use by modernists and liberal theologians including Aurobindo Ghose and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin has been a "major force" in the process of desacralization of knowledge.

[42] According to David Burrell, the "roots of the betrayal" may be found "on the other side of Descartes", in the high scholasticism that includes the thought of Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventure and Duns Scotus.

According to Nasr, their syntheses "tended to become over-rationalistic in imprisoning intuitions of a metaphysical order in syllogistic categories which were to hide, rather than reveal, their properly speaking intellectual rather than purely rational character".

[43] According to the traditional perspective, externalization and desacralization of knowledge has led to the belief all that can be understood is science in terms of information, quantification, analysis and their subsequent technological implications.

In saying "I think, therefore I am," Nasr contends, Descartes was not alluding to the "divine I" who proclaimed "I am the Truth" (ana’l-Haqq) through the mouth of Mansur al-Hallaj seven centuries before Descartes, the Divine Self which alone has the authority to proclaim I. [ 28 ] [ 29 ]
Hegel is said to have taken a decisive step in the process of desacralization, turning the whole process of knowledge into a dialectic inseparable from change and becoming. [ 37 ] [ 38 ]
For Nasr, the adoption of the rationalist branch of ancient Greek philosophy, particularly Aristotle (above), led to a shift away from sacred knowledge in the West. [ 44 ]