The process of resacralization of knowledge seeks to reinstate the role of intellect—the divine faculty believed to exist in every human being—above and beyond that of reason, as well as to revive the role of traditional metaphysics in acquiring knowledge—especially knowledge of God—by drawing on sacred traditions and sacred science that uphold divine revelations and the spiritual or gnostic teachings of all revealed religions.
[5] In reference to the Sufi view of the "veil of perception" which is said to conceal the Ultimate Reality, Nasr contends that knowledge of Self and the physical world of modernity is superficial, resulting in "an externalized image away from the cosmic center" because modern civilization confuses the "quantitative accumulation of information" with "qualitative penetration" into the deeper dimensions of reality.
[8] Nasr credits individuals such as A. H. Anquetil Duperron, J. Hammer-Purgstall, and Sir William Jones, as well as Thomas Taylor, Walt Whitman, and the New England Transcendentalists, among others, for paving the way toward the rediscovery of the sacred in the West.
[10] According to Nasr, the sapiental perspective in the West had become too weak due to the lack of "authentic contact" with the Oriental traditions, which had retained their basic teachings intact in their doctrinal and operational dimensions.
Nasr mentions Rene Guenon, Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, and Frithjof Schuon among others as having sought to restore the sapiential dimension in the West.
[13]In opposition to supposed reductionist tendencies of modern human sciences, Nasr contends that the sapiential tradition of world religions provides a comprehensive account of the hierarchy of knowledge that correlates to different orders of reality.
The reconstruction of knowledge within the framework of tawhid amounts, therefore, to a re-enchantment of the world, a re-sacralization, a reversal of the process of rationalization, the Entzauberungprozess.
The concept of tawhid here has implications on both the ontological and epistemological levels, since it eliminates the subject-object duality that lies at the heart of the post-Enlightenment paradigm of thought.
According to Nasr, rationality without intuition along with the idea of the knowing subject separated from the known object cause us to become preoccupied with the particular, relative, and ephemeral or the Universal, Absolute, and Eternal, without really being able to correlate the two.
[26] The Dictionary of Literary Biography also describes Nasr's response to the issue of desacralization of knowledge as a return to tradition, which entails "truths or principles of a divine origin revealed or unveiled to mankind and, in fact, a whole cosmic sector through various figures envisaged as messengers, prophets, avataras, the Logos or other transmitting agencies" as well as their implications in various domains of human life and thought.
[27] Ernest Wolf-Gazo asserts that "In Nasr's universe of discourse the concepts of revelation, unity, origin, source, tradition, perennial wisdom, sophia, and intellectual intuition of God are interrelated like a cobweb."
Nasr, along with members of the Traditionalist School such as Frithjof Schuon, René Guénon, and Titus Burckhardt, contends that the premodern and modern sciences differ in their conceptions of nature, methods, cosmological presuppositions, epistemological perspective, and the parametric structure used to process the "facts" discovered through observation and experimentation.
[32] According to Kathleen Raine, Nasr does not oppose "science itself, as such and within its own field", but rather scientism,[33] which Gai Eaton defines "as the whole body of thought and speculation constructed upon the working theories whereby scientists attempt to coordinate their observations and to explain rationally a phenomenal world to which they do not possess the key".
For this reason, despite the fact that certain intuitions and discoveries made possible by modern science reveal the Divine Origin of the natural world, it has been so marginalized that it is hardly acknowledged.
Traditional sciences, on the other hand, maintain the "hierarchy of realities, the primacy of the spiritual over the material, the sacred character of the cosmos, and the unity of knowledge and interrelatedness of beings.
[39] Nasr believes that the only way to counteract scientism, which he predicts will gain strength as scientific applications in the form of technology continue to undermine the sanctity of the human person while also hastening ecological degradation of the planet, is through sacred science, which upholds the hierarchy of knowledge and sapiential teachings of the world religions.
[16] According to Nasr, the rediscovery of the sacred dimension of knowledge would cast fresh light on Greek wisdom, the wisdom of Plato, Plotinus, and other Graeco-Alexandrian sages as well as teachings such as Hermeticism, not as mere "human philosophy" but as sacred teachings of divine inspiration comparable to Hindu darśanas rather than modern philosophical schools of today.
[40] According to Nidhal Guessoum, the concepts of God's "robust unity" and the function of intuitive knowledge bring nothing new to our understanding of scientific processes.
He believes that deconstructing science in order to resacralize it is unnecessary because the ultimate objective is to reconcile "religious tradition with rational and scientific modernity.
[42] However, Ernest Wolf-Gazo sees a possibility of reconciling Nasr's philosophy with the Western tradition, if positive worldviews in this regard can be reconstructed, taking into account the philosophies of figures such as Plato, Plotinus, Meister Eckhart, Cusanas, Spinoza, Goethe and German romantics such as Novalis, Schlegel, Schelling and Steffen.
Thus, he embraced the concept of a scientific ethos that is founded on "a humanistic, holistic approach that is not value free and that has scientists who care about the people and topics they investigate."
[45] In order to accomplish this, scholars may need to reexamine early sociological works by Weber, Durkheim, Eliade, and others not only for their relevance but also for their shortcomings in contemporary analysis.