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An
Interview with Seyyed Hossein Nasr
"Scripture, Society, and Traditional Wisdom"
Michael
Barnes Norton, Journal of Philosophy and Scripture
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JPS: The traditional, or perennial, philosophy of which
you are a well-known proponent reserves a privileged place for the
sacred scriptures of the religious traditions of the world. The
majority of Western philosophy over the past few centuries has been
in the process of segregating itself from these scriptures. How
would you characterize the different approaches of Western philosophy
and traditional philosophy to sacred scripture?
SHN: There's a very
profound distinction, if by Western philosophy you mean modern Western
philosophy. In the West, Christian and Jewish philosophy both in
the middle ages and, to some extent, afterwards still paid a great
deal of attention to the scriptures, and Islamic philosophy has
always paid attention to the scriptures. Not that it has just based
itself on the scriptures, or it would be just theology and not philosophy,
but it has paid a great deal of attention especially to the inner
meaning of scripture. Some of the great Islamic philosophers like
Mulla Sadra, and before him Ibn Sina (Avicenna), had written commentaries
upon the Qur'an. And we have parallels in the west: St. Thomas Aquinas,
and many Jewish thinkers and philosophers as well.
Now modern philosophy,
beginning with Descartes, is characterized by practically a total
disregard for scripture as a source of philosophical knowledge.
Although there are people here and there who pay some attention
to this, by and large European philosophy in the modern period from
Descartes on is not concerned with scripture. If it is, it would
be only on the level of ethics but not metaphysics. Perennial philosophy,
on the other hand, looks upon the scriptures as revelations from
God and believes that in the inner dimension, the esoteric dimension,
of scriptures is contained the perennial wisdom with which the perennial
philosophy is concerned. So the heart, the inner aspect of the religions
as revealed in scriptures contain that religio perennis,
that eternal religion, or the sophia perennis, the eternal
wisdom, with which perennial philosophy is concerned. And therefore,
perennial philosophy pays a great deal of attention to scripture,
not only as a source of ethics but also as a source of metaphysics.
JPS: You made a distinction
between having scripture as a foundation, which would be more like
theology, and paying attention to scripture within a philosophical
context. How can philosophy pay attention to and incorporate scripture
when most scriptures are not written in philosophical language,
often using narrative or metaphor to convey their meaning?
SHN: I think that can
be clarified by having recourse to two very important truths which
have been emphasized a great deal in perennial philosophy. First
of all, the perennial philosophers believe that the instrument of
revelation is none other than the intellect, understood metaphysically,
which is also the element which illuminates our mind and provides
us with knowledge. For example, in Arabic the word ‘aql,
which means the intellect-not only reason but also intellect in
the medieval sense of the term-is also associated with the very
instrument of revelation, the archangel Gabriel who brought the
Qur'an to the Prophet. And also in Augustinian illuminationistic
philosophy, knowledge is considered to be a kind of illumination
by the angel, and revelation is also concerned with the coming into
this world of a message through what one could call angelic agency.
Therefore, the first point is that the means whereby scripture is
revealed and the means whereby one knows in a noetic and intellectual
sense are the same.
Secondly, philosophers-that
is, traditional philosophers, those who follow the perennial philosophy-they
have looked upon scripture not simply on its literal level but on
its symbolic level. So even something which is descriptive, let
us say the Song of Solomon in the Old Testament, have been the source
of very profound metaphysical commentaries and mystical commentaries,
because the traditional philosophers have looked upon the text not
only in its literal aspect but in its symbolic aspect. In Islam
we have many, many commentaries upon the Qur'an, by both Sufis and
Islamic philosophers, in which even what appears to be narrative
of some sacred history is interpreted in a symbolic way to convey
meanings which are transhistorical and metaphysical.
JPS: Recently many
so-called postmodern philosophers from the continental tradition
have been incorporating readings of scriptures and other religious
texts in a way that is, in a sense, much more open than some of
their modern predecessors. Do you think this might signal new possibilities
for a dialogue with the traditional perspective?
SHN: I don't think so.
Of course, it depends on where postmodernism goes. Every few years,
some new current comes, and by the time you study it some other
new current comes. As far as studying scripture, yes, that would
be an opening, but postmodernism by and large denies certitude in
knowledge. It tries to deconstruct the world of meaning of traditional
philosophies, and its understanding of the intellect, of our noetic
faculties, of the way we know are very different from what the perennial
philosophy envisages. So although there is now some interest in
the reading of scripture, how we read and what it means I think
in the two cases are very different.
JPS: Also, the postmodern
thinkers tend to emphasize things like cultural differences that
they would take to be absolute...
SHN: Well, they're relativists;
that is, ultimately they read sacred scripture, but they do not
accept revelation in the real sense of the term-that there's a divine
reality, God, who can reveal knowledge to human beings, whether
in the form of a book, or, in India, in the form of creatures, or
whatever it is. Revelation as understood metaphysically, they do
not accept that. So, what is important for them, as you say, is
cultural determinance, which reduces things to a kind of relativism.
This has been going on for a long time, and much of postmodern philosophy
is the extreme denouement, unfolding, of that process. By that I
mean that, for a long time now in the West, philosophers who have
been rationalists have tried to deny the certitudes of religion,
and that's why natural theology gradually became marginalized and
Christians who tried to continue to accept religion based themselves
upon faith rather than upon reason. Now there's a kind of revival
within Catholic theology, and to some extent Protestant theology,
to try to come back to the older position. Anyway, as far as philosophy
is concerned, it began to relativize these matters, and in the nineteenth
century sociology and the positivism of Auguste Comte and these
people tried to reduce all religious truth to consequences of a
social situation-socially determined, culturally determined. That
is, let's say, if Moses received the revelation on Mount Sinai that
"thou shalt not kill," that was now a revelation that was culturally
determined by the conditions of the nomads on the Sinai peninsula
or something like that, or the Jews in Egypt.
Now, tradition does
not accept that at all, and perennial philosophy is not concerned
with reducing the truth of scripture to culturally determined conditions
but accepts that scripture comes from God and tries to understand
its inner meaning. Of course, it accepts the fact that, as the Qur'an
says, God only speaks to people in their language; that is, scripture
is revealed in a particular language for a particular humanity to
understand. But by virtue of its inner levels of meaning, it has
a meaning that transcends those conditions. For example, let me
take the specific case of Christianity. Christ said in the famous
Sermon on the Mount in Jerusalem some very exalted ethical teachings.
Now, many Christians consider that to be valid, and to say, "Oh,
that was determined by the social and cultural conditions of Jerusalem
at that time, and they're totally irrelevant to Washington, DC or
Philadelphia in 2004."... There are some people who say that, there's
no doubt about it, but those who remain Christians do not believe
that the teachings of Christ are simply culturally determined by
the Palestine of 2000 years ago. And philosophically speaking, as
far as the perennial philosophy is concerned, there's no way that
these postmodern philosophers can prove that scripture is simply
determined by cultural conditions. It's just a matter of faith by
them that scriptures are not revealed, as it is a matter of faith
by people of faith that they are revealed.
JPS: As you mentioned-and
I think this is one of the points of perennial philosophy that are
most misunderstood by people thinking outside it-there is still
an emphasis in the perennial philosophy on those differences despite
the certainty of revelation.
SHN: Oh absolutely,
the perennial philosophy emphasizes not only that there are differences
of forms, but that the differences of forms are themselves significant-that
Hinduism doesn't look like Judaism on the level of forms-and what
these forms mean. But what it refuses to do is to deny that there
is such a thing as a reality beyond the temporal. Whereas most of
these postmodern philosophers, that's what they do. They don't want
to come out and say it, but they deny that there is any reality
beyond the spatio-temporal sequence in which we live, and therefore
everything is reduced to that flow in time.
JPS: Do you think
that Islam and the history of Islamic philosophy lends itself and
has leant itself more easily to the adoption of the traditional
perspective than, say, Christianity in the West, which has become
increasingly secularized throughout the modern period?
SHN: Yes, and the reason
for that is that in the Islamic world what we would call gnosis,
pure metaphysics, a spiritual path based on knowledge, the knowledge
that saves and that is illuminative, continued to survive and was
very strong until modern times. Whereas in the Christian West, these
forms of sapiental knowledge and perspective and spirituality became
to a large extent eclipsed at the end of the middle ages, and that
gave rise to nominalism, first of all, while Christian philosophy
was still alive, and then a rebelling against Christian philosophy
in the Renaissance and especially in the seventeenth century with
modern philosophy. These things did not occur in the Islamic world,
not because Islamic philosophers were stupid and didn't understand
what these Western philosophers were doing, but because there was
no need in a Cartesian way to overcome a doubt which had been created
in the mind of Descartes precisely because of the loss of intellectual
intuition. In the earlier period of Christian history, the trajectory
of the life of Christian philosophy and Islamic philosophy were
very similar, besides the fact that many Islamic texts were translated
into Latin and influenced Western philosophy a great deal. Independently
of the influence, Christian philosophy was following a path very
similar in many ways-not identical because for example Christian
philosophy accepted the incarnation and Islamic philosophy did not,
but in many ways similar. But Islamic philosophy, rather than turning
against illumination towards empiricism as it did in the West, in
fact went the other way around and became more and more wed to the
doctrines of illumination and knowledge that is illuminative and
salvific, and therefore survived as a very important, you might
say, protector of the perennial philosophy up to our own times.
JPS: Do you think
that there is anything particular in the foundation of the Christian
tradition-for instance the belief in the incarnation-that would
have made it more susceptible to a modern, Cartesian turn, or do
you think it is just a contingency of history?
SHN: It's a very complicated
matter, and there are several elements that made it possible for
anti-religious forces to overcome Christian thought more easily
than in any other part of the world, as far as other religions are
concerned. First of all, Christianity was heir to a rabid rationalism
in the ancient Mediterranean world and so came as a way of love
to overcome this false rationalism. But soon, of course, it had
developed its own ways of sapiens, its own philosophies, and it
did so but was not able to neutralize completely the paganism of
the ancient world. It did for some time, but then it [rationalism]
raised its head in the Renaissance independently of Christianity
and marginalized to a large extent Christian philosophy. Not so
that it died completely, but it was marginalized to a large extent,
and the mainstream of European philosophy became secularized. Nothing
like that occurred in any of the other civilizations of the world,
not only in the Islamic but also Hindu, Chinese, Japanese, etc.
In those cases, it was the militarily powerful West, which became
militarily powerful as a result of secularism, that dominated over
those worlds militarily during the colonial period and brought secularism
with it, which is quite a different process.
And there are many other
elements in the structure of Christianity. For example, in Islam
the esoteric dimension, associated with Sufism primarily, and the
form of knowledge, of gnosis, of divine knowledge which is
preserved therein, was always very clearly protected throughout
the history of the tradition. Although here or there somebody may
have attacked it, it remained very viable and vibrant. Whereas in
Christianity, while we have the great mystical currents of the middle
ages, some of which like that of St. Bonaventure and Dante are very
sapiental and really are forms of perennial philosophy at the highest
level, they were not protected by the Church at all, and, in fact,
gradually they were put down. So in the modern period, you can ask
the question, "What happened to Christian mysticism? Why were there
no Meister Eckharts and St. Bonaventures in eighteenth century Germany
or France? What happened?" Of course, secularism destroyed many
things, but also the religion itself-the Church itself-was not the
guardian of the esoteric currents. So after the middle ages, it
became more and more a means of putting them down, so that some
of them became marginalized, some of them became cults, some of
them died out, and by and large access to the more inner dimension
of Christianity became less and less available after the middle
ages. All of these are elements that have to be considered, and
it's a very complex set of events that are contained in your question.
JPS: You've noted
in your work three distinct attitudes in contemporary Islam, the
so-called fundamentalist, the modern, and the traditional, and you
observe that only the first two have become instantiated in socio-political
institutions. So, what kind of political, ethical, and ecological
consequences would a more concrete form of the traditional perspective
have?
SHN: I do not know that
the world is good enough for the traditional perspective to have
direct political expression, only God knows, but it does have its
influence in the other two worlds. The fact that there is no government
in the Islamic world today that is neither fundamentalist nor modernist
but traditional doesn't mean that the influence of traditional Islam
is not strong in other ways in those countries which are either
fundamentalist or modern. This having been said, if there were to
be a whole state structure, a whole social structure based on traditional
Islamic teachings... First of all, there would be a lack of this
extremism which characterizes certain parts of the Islamic world
today, which we associate with fundamentalism, and this exclusivism.
There would be a much more accommodating attitude towards other
religions, as we see in traditional Islamic history-for example,
the Ottoman Empire in Iran, in Egypt the Mamluk period, in Spain
especially during Islamic rule, and so forth. Secondly, there would
not be this rabid acceptance of Westernization and modernization.
Some elements are unavoidable, I accept that today. But many things
are avoidable, and those could be avoided and as much as possible
traditional forms of arts, of crafts, of creation, of alternative
technologies could be used. And that itself would have a very profound
effect upon the ecological questions. Today in the Islamic world
every country, whether it's modernist or fundamentalist, is trying
to ape Western technology and industry, and therefore with it all
of the ecological consequences that this modernist tradition has
brought upon us throughout the world. It [traditionalism] would
be a much more sane way of dealing with the world of nature.
Now, whether other countries
in the world, I mean outside the Islamic world, would allow such
a thing to survive is another question. That's a question for another
day and not for me to discuss. But, if there were to be, let's say,
a country which would be ruled completely on the basis of traditional
Islamic teachings, there would be these differences: the attitude
towards other religions, the attitude towards other minorities,
the question of the revival of Islamic art, of Islamic traditional
thought, and at the same time modes of production which would be
more traditional and less destructive of the environment, and many
other things. It's very difficult, of course, while we have a global
economy which tries to encompass everything within itself, to have
exceptions. So there are degrees to which this could be done. I'm
not saying it could be done one-hundred percent, while the rest
of the world is galloping in another direction. But there would
be perceptible changes. Meanwhile, the role of the traditional Islam
in the Islamic world is precisely to try to prevent forms of extreme
interpretation, either on behalf of the fundamentalists or the modernists
in the Islamic world. That role is a very significant one.
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