~Seyyed Hossein Nasr
Consciousness is itself proof of the primacy of the Spirit or Divine Consciousness of which human consciousness is a reflection and echo.The very natural propensity
of the human intelligence to regard the Spirit as having primacy over the material
and of consciousness as being on a higher level of reality than even the largest material
object in the universe is itself proof of the primacy of the substance of knowledge
over that which it knows, for the raison d’être of intelligence is to know reality objectively,
totally, and adequately according to the famous principle of adequation of the
medieval Scholastics.
Human consciousness or subjectivity which makes knowledge
possible is itself proof that the Spirit is the Substance compared to which all material
manifestation, even what appears as the most substantial, is but an accident. It is in
the nature and destiny of man to know and ultimately to know the Absolute and the
Infinite through an intelligence which is total and objective and which is inseparable
from the Sacred that is at once its origin and end.
Man is, of course, from a certain point of view the rational being defined by the
philosophers, but the rational faculty which is at once an extension and reflection
of the Intellect can become a ludferian force and instrument if divorced from the Intellect
and revelation which alone bestow upon knowledge its numinous quality and
sacred content. Therefore, rather man defining him only as a “rational animal,” one
can define man in a more principial manner as a being endowed with a total intelligence
centered upon the Absolute and created to know the Absolute.
To be human is
to know and also to transcend oneself. To know means therefore ultimately to know
the Supreme Substance which is at once the source of all that comprises the objective
world and the Supreme Self which shines at the center of human consciousness and
which is related to intelligence as the sun is related to its rays.
Despite the partial
loss and eclipse of this properly speaking intellectual faculty and its replacement by
reason, the roots of knowledge remain sunk in the ground of the Sacred and sacred
knowledge continues to be at the heart of the concern of man for the sacred. It is
not possible in fact to rediscover the sacred without discovering once again the sacred
quality of principial knowledge.
Moreover, this process can be facilitated by tracing
the trajectory which knowledge followed in its fall from being the fruit of the Tree
of Life to becoming limited to the realm of profane knowledge, which in its expansion
and even totalitarianism only hastens man’s fall from the state of wholeness and
the abode of grace, resulting finally in the desacralization of all of human life to an
ever greater degree. To reinstate man to his position of humanity cannot occur without
the rediscovery of the basic function of intelligence as the means of access to that
which is central and essential, to the Reality from which issues all religion and all wisdom
but also the nonsapiential modes of perfection such as the way of good works
and love.
The reduction of the Intellect to reason and the limitation of intelligence to cunning and cleverness in the modern world not only caused sacred knowledge to become inaccessible and to some even meaningless, but it also destroyed that natural theology which in the Christian context represented at least a reflection of knowledge of a sacred order, of the wisdom or sapientia which was the central means of spiritual perfection and deliverance.
Natural theology which was originally sapientia as understood by Plato in the Republic and Laws, and which was later relegated by Saint Augustine and other Christian authorities to an inferior but nevertheless valuable form of knowledge of things divine, was completely banished from the citadel of both science and faith as the process of the sacralization of knowledge and the reduction of reason to a purely human and “this-worldly” instrument of perception reached its terminal point with the last phases of development of modern Western philosophy.
To reinstate the supernaturally natural function of intelligence, to wed reason (ratio) to the Intellect (intellectus) once again, and to rediscover the possibility of attaining to sacred knowledge include therefore also a return to the appreciation of the importance of natural theology on its own level, which is of a lower order than what could be called scientia sacra, but which has nevertheless been of much importance in the traditional intellectual landscape of theWestern world.
The eclipse of natural theology has also been accompanied by the casting into oblivion of the essentially sacred character of both logical and mathematical laws which are aspects of Being itself and, one might say, the “ontology of the human microcosm”8 What is the origin of this logical and mathematical certitude in the human mind and why do these laws correspond to aspects of objective reality?
The origin is none other than the Divine Intellect whose reflection on the human plane constitutes the certitude, coherence, and order of logical and mathematical laws and which is, at the same time, the source of that objective order and harmony which the human mind is able to study through these laws. Logical laws, in contrast to subjective limitations and individual idiosyncracies associated with the luciferian tendencies of rationalism, are rooted in the Divine and possess an oncological reality. They, as well as principial knowledge traditionally associated with wisdom, are essentially of a sacred character whatever certain antirational theologians, anxious to prevent rationalism from overrunning the citadel of faith, may claim.
As a result of the loss of the sapiential perspective in modern times and the desacralization of knowledge, however, not only has natural theology been cast aside as irrelevant but logic and mathematics have been so divorced from concern with the sacred that they have come to be used as the primary tools for the secularization and profanation of the very act and process of knowing.
Many a theologian has taken a defensive position before the achievements of the mathematical sciences, unaware that in the certitude which the propagators of such sciences claim lies a reflection of that Intellect which is the grand path to the Sacred and which itself is of a sacred nature, the Intellect without whose reflection there would be no logical and mathematical laws and all operations of the mind would be reduced to sheer arbitrariness.
From: Chapter 1, Knowledge and its Desacralization
[Knowlegde and the Sacred]