ABSTRACT

Seyyed Hossein Nasr's work reflects his commitments to inter-religious conversation, grounded in a perennialist or traditionalist view, identifying key commonalities between various religious traditions. Nasr's lectures locate the crisis of ecological degradation with the scientistic disentanglement of human beings from a cosmological framework of meaning. Nasr highlights Persian Islamic philosopher Avicenna, whose cosmology includes angelic presences met in the journey of the soul through the seven heavens. Nasr highlights the importance of curbing greed via ascetic perspective and practices shown in a variety of religious traditions. Nasr's work demystifies science and reanimates nature, in the sense that the fundamental problem has been with perception of a world, which in its essence never lost its sacral quality. Nasr highlights cosmological doctrines connecting the human body with the earth, both reinvigorated by a reframing of reality from mechanistic to sacralized locations of meaning. Nasr consistently invokes the importance of analogy and symbolism to elucidate human relationality in a sacralized world.