Knowledge and the Sacred

Seyyed Hossein Nasr is University Professor of Islamic Studies at George Washington University. He is the author of many books, including Islamic Art and Spirituality, Islamic Life and Thought, and Sufi Essays, and the editor of Expectation of the Millennium: Shi'ism in History and Shi'ism: Doctrines, Thought, and Spirituality, also published by SUNY Press.

"Professor Nasr draws upon the full range of the great religious traditions—Hindu, Buddhist, Jewish, Christian, and Islamic—and much of modern philosophical thought as well, to establish the close connection between religious experience and speculative thought in the various traditions." — Cross Currents"This remarkably comprehensive, indeed magisterial, exposition and analysis of sacred tradition as such, illuminated by innumerable expressions of traditional wisdom both primal and historical from East and West, constitutes Seyyed Hossein Nasr's basic text from which he delivered the Gifford Lectures in Edinburgh in 1981. The ten chapters of Knowledge and the Sacred unfold and develop in a brilliant and creative manner, each preparing for and then illuminating the next in such an organic way that at the conclusion of the total work one has the sense not just of having learned about the multiple levels and dimensions of sacred worlds, but of having experienced integrally something of the beauty and truth of such worlds." — Parabola"As for the book at hand, if its author is a phenomenon, this latest book is an event. If we are looking for clear signs of a new day, one in which the West is seriously trying to globalize its outlook, here is one that can be pinpointed. Looking back on Knowledge and the Sacred, intellectual historians may one day rank it with William of Moerbeke's Latin translations of Aristotle in the thirteenth century, Marsiglio Ficino's of Plato in the fifteenth, or D.T. Suzuki's 1927 Essays in Zen Buddhism as a landmark showing that a new stage in cross-cultural understanding has been achieved." — Huston Smith"Nasr is no proselytizer; it is not a question of yet another of the far too numerous self-appointed purveyors of bogus Eastern wisdom, but rather of a scholar of the first rank who has gained wide international recognition. He does not bid us forsake our primary traditional heritages, but rather to drink more deeply from our own wells. The immense breadth of evidence presented is drawn from the teachings of many traditions, but the correlation of many differing points of view—never done artificially or syncretistically—will make these doctrines accessible to readers from many diverse backgrounds." — Perspectives in Religious Studies

• PREFACE 1. Knowledge and Its Desacralization 2. What Is Tradition? 3. The Rediscovery of the Sacred: The Revival of Tradition 4. Scientia Sacra 5. Man, Pontifical and Promethean 6. The Cosmos as Theophany 7. Eternity and the Temporal Order 8. Traditional Art as Fountain of Knowledge and Grace 9. Principial Knowledge and the Multiplicity of Sacred Forms 10. Knowledge of the Sacred as Deliverance INDEX