Religion and the order of nature

This work by Seyyed Hossein Nasr represents an ambitious religious and spiritual analysis and reflection on the global environmental crisis. The author returns to the subject he first discussed in his seminal work Man and Nature (1968) and develops it elegantly from the point of view of the world’s main religions and spiritual traditions. He argues that the devastation and corruption of the planet has been magnified – and even provoked – by a reductionist view of nature derived from modern secular science. We must rediscover the reality that all great human spiritual traditions accept: that nature is sacred.

This work questions from a philosophical and metaphysical standpoint the totalitarian pretensions of modern science and aims to re-open the road to a religious view of nature, which was developed over many centuries (or even millennia) by cosmologies and traditional sciences. The revival of this knowledge in a language more fitting to the present day would mutually enrich all the world’s religions and enable them to cooperate and heal the wounds we have inflicted on the Earth. The book also contains numerous bibliographic references.