The following is the text of the Opening Address at the Sacred Web Conference 2014, on the theme of ‘Rediscovering the Sacred in our Lives and in our Times’.
Welcome to Vancouver and to the Sacred Web Conference of 2014. The purpose of this conference is twofold. Firstly, it is to remind ourselves of the importance of the Sacred. In view of the secularist drift in society through which religion has come under attack both from without and from within, it is important to remind ourselves of what is integral to religion, the dimension of the Sacred, and to rediscover it. That is the main focus of this conference. Secondly, we would like to pay tribute to Dr. Seyyed Hossein Nasr. There is no person that I can think of better than Dr. Nasr to speak to us about the Sacred. Like me, many who are present here today will have first encountered Dr. Nasr through his writings, and I am sure you will agree with me that his works are imbued with the fragrance of the Sacred. This conference is therefore, in part, a tribute to Dr. Nasr to mark his recent 80th birthday.
Turning to the main theme of the conference, I stated that religion has been under attack both from without and from within and I just want to expand on that a bit. When the 2006 Sacred Web Conference was held, Sam Harris’ book, The End of Faith, had already been published and had gained some traction in Western (particularly North American) society. It propagated a thesis that had been around for a long time: that religion is dead, that God is dead, and that faith too is dead. And just before the 2006 conference, Sam Harris had responded to his critics by publishing Letter to a Christian Nation. Shortly after that Richard Dawkins published his book with the notorious title The God Delusion which then spawned a lot of responses, for example, David Berlinsky’s The Devil’s Delusion, and there were other responses too, presenting ‘The Case for God’, as, for example, Karen Armstrong’s book by that title indicates.
Along with these ‘intellectual’ debates about faith in God and questions about the relevance and value of religion in our lives, we have also been faced with certain events happening in the world at large, in politics and society, that have tarnished the image of religion, and particularly, of Islam, as illustrated by the fact that the term ‘Muslim’ is still often used in the media in conjunction with the word ‘fundamentalist’. This has been a common association, a sad association, and it is the kind of association that has contributed to the view that is expressed in the subtitle of the late Christopher Hitchens’ ill-titled book, God is not Great—the view that ‘Religion Poisons Everything’.
Apart from such external attacks on religion, religion has also been beset by challenges from within.This has occurred in two ways: on the one hand,there are those whom I would call the“homogenizers”that is, the reductionists who want to impose a particular uniform on religion, and to say that “if you don’t follow ‘our way’ then you’re not a member of ‘our club’”, and in some cases those who hold this view also resort to violence to impose their views on others; and then there are those whom I would call the“diluters”,the relativists who have made religion a matter of their personal whims. Both these groups, where they are Muslims, have in fact forgotten the two relevant Qur’anic precepts: in the case of the “homogenizers”, that there is no compulsion in religion (see Qur’an, 2:256), and in the case of the “diluters”, that to stray from the True Path is to follow one’s vain desires (see Qur’an, 45:23).
In all these cases, whether the attacks on religion were external or internal, and whether they came from the homogenizers or the diluters or the secularists, the attacks fuelled each other in a reactionary sense. Lost in all of this reaction was the sense of the Centre, the sense of the Sacred. Caught in the vicissitudes of our times, it is the Sacred that we need to rediscover, the sacred Norm that constitutes the criterion of objectivity by which we can regain the Equilibrium in our lives.
So what exactly is the Sacred? The term ‘sacred’ is related to the word ‘holy’ from the old English word ‘halig’, which is echoed in the German word for the sacred,‘heilig’ and is also related etymologically to the Latin word, ‘sanctus’, in both cases denoting the sense of ‘wholeness’. So when we speak of the Sacred we are reminding ourselves of the wholeness of reality, of its absolute dimension.The ‘Sacred’, then, is the presence of the whole in its parts, of the Absolute in the contingent, of the Eternal in the temporal, of the Infinite in the finite, so that, like William Blake (d. 1827), in the famous opening verse of his Auguries of Innocence, we are reminded of its presence:
“To see a World in a Grain of Sand And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour.”
The Sacred is both immanent, being within us, and transcendent, being beyond us. Because Reality cannot be excluded from the conditions of existence, it is within us immanently, intimate as the innermost part of our being,‘closer to us than our jugular vein’ (see Qur’an, 50:16). At the same time, because Reality cannot be limited to the conditions of existence, it is also transcendent, affirming the truth that ‘there is none like unto Him’ (see Qur’an, 42:11), and reminding us as Hamlet reminded Horatio in Shakespeare’s play, that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy (I.v.167-8). It is not metaphysicians, theologians, and poets alone who affirm transcendence. There is a scientific basis for transcendence in Gödel’s incompleteness theorems which, to paraphrase in lay language, affirm that systems cannot be validated from within, that one has to step outside of them. Consequently, if we think of existence as a system, existence has to be validated from something beyond itself. So there is a transcendent dimension in Reality, which is why in the East, the Advaita Vedantists use the Sanskrit term ‘neti neti’ to express the truth that Reality is ‘not this, not that’, that there is nothing here in existential reality that one can reduce definitively to the Absolute. The Absolute is beyond everything. Thus when Ananda K. Coomaraswamy (d. 1947), the great Singhalese metaphysician, was asked about God, he said that “God is not probable, but axiomatic”. We have to start our search for the Sacred by affirming transcendence, axiomatically, and when we speak about the Absolute we have to speak about a transcendent dimension as well as an immanent dimension.
Being transcendent, the Sacred is both beyond time and space. It can therefore be understood as both the Origin and the Centre, in accordance with the metaphysical principles summarized in the Qur’anic text,‘God is the First and the Last, the Hidden and the Manifest’ (Qur’an, 57:3). Sacredness resides in the Presence of the Absolute.The Manifest phenomenon (al-Zahir) is the veil of the Hidden noumenon (al-Batin), simultaneously concealing and revealing It.To quote Dr. Nasr’s definition of the Sacred, ‘The Sacred is the presence of the Centre in the periphery of the circle of existence’. This definition is felicitous because it echoes the Augustinian expression of God as ‘a circle whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere’—the perfect expression of ‘tawhid’ or the Unity that is both immanent (hence ‘everywhere’) and transcendent (hence ‘nowhere’).
To apprehend the Sacred is to reconnect, in a dimension beyond time and space, with our Origin and our Centre. It is to remember where we have come from and who we are. It is the basis from which we can derive our purpose and our meaning in life, the sense that there is a greater purpose than our own—more than the merely finite and temporal purpose that we think that we have in our lives—and that when we relate to other creatures in this world we are relating to a part of ourselves: that, in a very profound sense,“to be is to be with”. It is to transcend our mundane existence and remind ourselves that we are not merely creatures of flesh and blood but spirits—to paraphrase Benjamin Franklin (from his letter to Elizabeth Hubbart, dated February 22, 1756), we are “spirits who have been loaned bodies”.
The next question we must ask is “How can we know the Sacred?” We must begin with the principle that, since we are speaking of a dimension of reality that is Absolute and is therefore greater than us, “the greater must reveal Itself to the lesser”. And so we can know the Sacred through the grace of revelation, that is to say, through its Divine Self-Disclosure. Revelation is to be understood here as ‘the Word of God’, the Logos, in its broadest sense, and its disclosure comes to us in three ways: firstly through its representation in the qualitative theophany that is the created world of Nature, secondly through our innermost ‘self’ that is our Primordial Nature, and thirdly through the Messengers whose bosoms have borne the Revealed Word from God to Man, and who exteriorize for us our Primordial Nature.To quote from the Holy Qur’an:“We shall show them our signs upon the horizons and in themselves until it is clear to them that It/He is real’ (Qur’an, 41:53). The word used in Arabic for ‘It/He’ is the pronoun ‘Hu’, which the Sufis interpret as signifying the Breath of God, the Nafas Rahmani, which, as the Murcian sage, ibn ‘Arabi reminds us, alchemically denotes the Holy Spirit (the Arabic term nafas or ‘breath’ having a mystical relationship to nafs or ‘self’).
How are we to recognize the Sacred in the world, through the theophany of creation? All that exists can be seen either as opaque or as translucent to the Sacred,‘translucence’ here denoting the inner dimension that opens us into the light of transcendence. I have taken as the title of my talk today a line from a poem by the Victorian Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins (d.1889). It is a well-known sonnet called ‘God’s Grandeur’, celebrating the presence of the Sacred in the theophany. The poem begins with these well-known lines:
The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out like shining from shook foil.
It gathers to a greatness like the ooze of oil
Crushed.
In the sonnet, Hopkins goes on to explore the bleary malaise of existence, of generations who like cattle, “have trod, have trod, have trod”, and to contrast this barren inner landscape of opacity, of those whose vision has turned away from God, and who are therefore numbed by a world that “wears man’s smudge, and shares man’s smell”, with those whose eyes are open to transcendence, and who can perceive the world as the ever-replenishing theophany, who witness that
...for all this, nature is never spent.
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things.
Hopkins reminds us that in the innermost Centre of the mundane real- ity of appearance, there is a Font from which the Divine is continually revealing Itself.This Centre is all around us and it is forever renewing, the source of freshness and therefore of hope, as the final lines of the poem testify:
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
It is this same vision of the wondrous theophany that one finds in the Nahjul Balagha or The Peak of Eloquence, containing Imam ‘Ali’s glorious descriptions of the marvels of, for example, a bat or an ant or a peacock. Through these descriptions, we are reminded that underlying the architecture of the world is a Grand Architect who in each moment remakes the world afresh. This is a vision of wholeness, of holiness. In the words of William Blake, “Everything that lives is holy.”Whatever we witness in the world, we must never lose sight of the wholeness or sacredness behind it.
Another way of understanding the theophany is as the Treasury of God, who is the ‘Hidden Treasure’ continually revealing Himself through His creatures, and they thereby embody His qualities and attributes.When we speak of God in Islam we refer to His qualities and attributes, typically stating that God has ‘99 Names’, each associated with a divine quality or attribute. Of course there are an infinite number of divine qualities and attributes, but every quality and attribute that exists in the world has its source and font in the celestial realm. The Abrahamic revelation that Adam was taught the names of all things, as the scriptures tell us (Qur’an, 2:31; see also Genesis, 2:20), is to be understood esoterically to mean that Adam was taught how to see to the core of things, to see them as translucent, as metaphysically transparent to transcendence, as opposed to seeing them in a purely opaque manner. Man was given the gift of seeing the qualitative essence of things, so that ‘knowing’, as Dr. Nasr has discussed in his celebrated Gifford Lectures, is ontological: it resides in the heart of our ‘being’.
So the theophanic Presence of Nature is one way that the Sacred reveals Itself to us. Another way that the Sacred reveals itself is through our Primordial Nature, our innermost self that is exemplified by the Universal Self (in Sufi terminology, al-insan al-Kamil, or Perfect Being). The Qur’anic term for this Primordial Nature is al-Fitrah (recalling the Hadith, “Every child is born with this Primordial Nature; it is only his parents that later turn him into a Jew, a Christian, or a Magian”). The Biblical teaching that Man is created in the Divine Image conveys this same truth, which is also found in the Qur’anic teaching of the Covenant of Alast (see Qur’an, 7:172) whereby Man undertook pre-eternally to witness the underlying Nature of God all things (this is why the witnessing or ‘Shahadah’ is of such fundamental importance in Islam and is the basis of one becoming a Muslim). Its central importance is attested by the following Qur’anic passage (Qur’an, 30:30), which sets out the central purpose of the faith of Islam, namely to conform to one’s Primordial Nature:
AND SO, set thy face steadfastly towards the [one ever-true] faith, turning away from all that is false, in accordance with the Primordial Nature [fitrah] which God has instilled into man: [for,] not to allow any change to corrupt what God has thus created in God’s creation—this is the [purpose of the one] ever-true faith; but most people know it not.
It is therefore an adage found in all the great faith traditions that“whoso- ever knows himself, knows his Maker.” We contain the essence of Reality in our ‘Self’. Hence the Hadith, “Heaven and earth cannot contain me, but the heart of my faithful believer contains me”.
So who exactly are we? “Who am I?”This is the perennial question that the great sages throughout history, from before the time of Plato to modern-day saints like Ramana Maharshi (d. 1950), have asked the spiritual seeker to explore in their quest to understand the nature of Nature.There is a wonderful poem which I would like to quote to you, which addresses this by making us aware of our transcendent selfhood. It is a poem written in Spanish by the Nobel Laureate, Juan Ramón Jiménez (d. 1958), and I often like to quote it in its English rendering by Robert Bly when I talk about this subject. It is called “I am not I”:
I am not I.
I am this one
Walking beside me whom I do not see,
Whom at times I manage to visit,
And whom at other times I forget;
Who remains calm and silent while I talk,
And forgives, gently, when I hate,
Who walks where I am not,
Who will remain standing when I die.
“Who am I?” God answers the great Prophet Moses, “I AM THAT I AM” (Exodus, 3:14). In the third part of the Mundaka Upanishad, there is a famous parable of two birds on a tree, one bird tasting its fruits, the fruits of the world, and the other merely observing. Similarly, there is in each of us a ‘self’ that lives as an actor in the world of existence, and also a deeper Self, the watchful observer. And when we ask who we are, it is only in the core of our being that we can know the I-am-ness of God, our Primordial Nature. It is only the Spirit that can know the Spirit. And the Spirit is the Reality we embody; it is not a mere idea in our heads. The great Irish poet and spiritual seeker, W.B.Yeats (d. 1939), in a letter written only weeks before his death, stated the great answer he had arrived at in response to the perennial question of selfhood: “When I try to put it all into a phrase I say, ‘Man can embody truth but he cannot know it.’” And it is this embodiment of Reality in the Heart of the self that is ‘sacred’. So it is that the Sufi metaphysician, poet and mystic of love, Jalaludin Rumi (d. 1273) says:
Even if I walk in the light, I am not the light.
Even if I am a taut-stringed lute, I am not the lute player.
There is a transcendent dimension that we must be aware of.
I have spoken of the meaning of the Sacred, and how it is revealed. Now I would like to address the question of how we can rediscover the Sacred. We have to affirm, firstly, the centrality of faith and secondly, the centrality of prayer, and I would like to say a few words about each of these.
As regards faith, the scriptures affirm that man has been given eyes to see the Invisible:“So interpret, O possessors of eyes!” it says in the Qur’an (see Qur’an, 59:2). The Sacred resides not in our outer seeing but in our innermost being. It is our very ‘core’—and the word ‘core’, I will remind you, is related to the word ‘coeur’, the French for ‘heart’. It is the Heart that is the font of“the dearest freshness deep down things”. William Blake, one of the great visionaries of the Imaginal world, and the philosopher of the ‘Poetic Genius’, wrote about the possibilities of seeing the Sacred:
How do you know but ev’ry Bird that cuts the airy way,
Is an immense world of delight, clos’d by your senses five?
In his book, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, he writes about opacity and translucence:
If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, Infinite.
For man has closed himself up till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.
What we need to do, as Blake indicates, is to see aright by “cleansing the doors of perception” so that our ‘seeing’ is not from the “narrow chinks of our cavern”, that is, from our outer faculties of the discursive mind and our merely physical senses, but from our Heart, our ‘being’. Hence, the importance of faith.
This understanding of perception as rooted in faith is implied in the metaphysical principle stated by the great perennialist metaphysician of the 20th century, Frithjof Schuon (d. 1998), who defined faith as “the adhesion of one’s whole being toTruth.”In order to rediscover the Sacred, we need not only to see things aright, but to conform to it, to “real-ize” it.We need to adhere ourselves to Reality, to re-bond.And that in fact is the significance of the word ‘religion’, derived from the Latin “re-ligare”, to re-bond or bind again. Through faith we can reconnect with the Sacred.
As regards prayer, it is the means of intimacy with the Divine: it is stated, for example, in the Qur’anic verse, “Remember Me, and I will remember you.” (Qur’an, 2:152) To invoke the Sacred is to be open to the grace of re-sacralization.It is to be ‘re-minded’ and to ‘re-member’ our own (dis-membered) identity, for we have all been created ‘from a single soul’ (see Qur’an, 4:1) and so we are translations of each other’s lives. Prayer is the remembrance of our intrinsic sacral identity. It is to steep ourselves in the Divine Presence through a process of remembrance, adhesion and identity, so that, as the Hadith Qudsi (or Sacred Saying of the Holy Prophet) states, God then becomes the ears by which we hear, the eyes by which we see, the hands by which we grasp, and the feet by which we walk. Prayer, then, is the means by which we can, by grace, attain to union with the Sacred.
Now it was the Greek philosopher, Plato, who famously spoke about the relationship between Truth, Goodness and Beauty and I just want to make a few comments about those terms.
‘Truth’ of course is the sacred dimension of Reality. It is the Absolute, and therefore both ‘wholeness’ and ‘holiness’. In theistic terminology, it is the sacred Presence of God in all things.
‘Goodness’ is the consciousness of the substantive nature of Being, which is compassion, love and empathy, the motive force of life. It is incumbent on us therefore to be aware of the ways in which we can, in our lives, increase the amplitude of the bandwidth of the soul. Franz Kafka once wrote: “Two exercises at life’s beginning: to narrow the circle about you more and more, and to check, again and again, that you are not hiding somewhere outside that circle”. Our lives are defined by circles that close us in or open us up. It is up to us to choose. There are dimensions beyond us that we do not readily acknowledge, that goodness will make us acknowledge. As the Sufis say, a light is there to shine, not to hide itself.
‘Beauty’, the third of Plato’s three terms, is the radiance of Being. It is, as the poet Hopkins says in his poem“God’s Grandeur”,that which“will flame out like shining from shook foil”. And when we see beauty we become aware of the Source of beauty, and of its presence in our eyes, in the very act of our seeing. In another of Hopkins’ poems, called “Pied Beauty”, which begins with the words “Glory be to God for dappled things”, the poet exclaims:
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him!
So ‘Beauty’ is to joyfully witness the ‘fathering-forth’ of the Sacred theophany, that is reminiscent for example in the Qur’anic passage: ‘Have you not seen how everything in the heavens and the earth glorifies God, and the birds spreading their wings hymn his praise?’ (Qur’an, 24:41)
To rediscover the Sacred is therefore to engage with Reality as Truth, Goodness and Beauty. It is to embody these qualities in our very being as (in Vedantist terminology) satchitananda: ‘sat’ as Truth, Primordial Nature or Being, ‘chit’ as the consciousness of our substance as Goodness, and ‘ananda’ as the state of being-in-Beauty.
Now I want to talk a little bit about the condition of our times, and to address the loss of the Sacred in our times. I can summarize our situation by quoting Marcellus to Hamlet: “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.”
Two of the great poets writing in English in the last century, Thomas Stearns Eliot (d. 1965) and William Butler Yeats, both Nobel Laureates, are regarded as great partly because they diagnosed the modern malaise. Each recognized that modernity has lost its compass. Eliot called the modern world a ‘wasteland’, a ‘place of disaffection’ peopled by men he called ‘hollow men’. It is a ‘world of perpetual solitude’ and ‘inoperancy of the world of spirit’. It is a world of surfaces, not a world in which we are easily aware of the Sacred, of Reality. In “Burnt Norton”, the first of Eliot’s “Four Quartets”, he writes:
Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.
The modern world is so alluring, so beguiling, that we cannot easily penetrate its veils. We are “distracted from distraction by distraction”, as he put it.
Yeats’s celebrated poem, the “The Second Coming”, written in 1919, begins with his evocation of a falcon and a falconer, a glorious image that Rumi often employs, but differently. Yeats employs the image to illustrate the centrifugal forces of reality, as a movement away from the sacred Centre. I quote the first few lines:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
The lines are a prescient but sad commentary on our times.They are resonant because they point to the loss of a Centre in our lives, a Centre which is the Heart of ourselves, which, as all the great faith traditions teach, we must discover.The consequences of not doing so are enormous.
If we fail to see the world as a theophany, then we will perceive it only as opaque, and consequently will not see each other as anything but ‘dust’. I am reminded of one of the comments made by a survivor after the horrific events of 9/11 who (referring to the attackers) said ‘we were as dust in their eyes’.
The French metaphysician, René Guénon (d. 1951), referred famously to the modern world as ‘The Reign of Quantity‘. We are increasingly losing the qualitative sense of life in the modern world, and so we don’t perceive reality in its fullness, as a connected whole, as a ‘sacred web’.
This is one of the great consequences of the loss of the sense of the Sacred in our times: we are becoming disconnected from what Plato termed ‘Truth’.
Consequently we are losing our moral bearings. We are losing our sense of good and bad, of right and wrong, our intrinsic sense of ‘Goodness’.We don’t know what the Norm is anymore because it is no longer rooted in our Primordial Nature but in extrinsic aspects such as fashions or subjectivities.When we look to discover what is normal, we typically tend to look around us and to see what other people are doing, which can change from time to time according to personal whims and societal trends, and we say ‘This is normal’. We have lost our criterion of objectivity, our moral compass, our intrinsic Norm.
There is a scene in Shakespeare’s play, King Lear, where, after the King has been rejected by two of his daughters, Goneril and Regan, he is out on the inclement heath in a hovel conversing with two fools: one is his court Fool, who is of course a symbol of his moral conscience and intelligence, and the other a feigning fool, Edgar, the unfairly disinherited son of Lear’s friend, the Duke of Gloucester. And the King holds court with them and he says to them:
Let them anatomize Regan. See what breeds about her heart. Is there any cause in nature that makes these hard hearts?
King Lear’s question is a vital question for our times where, almost daily in the reported news, we hear of atrocities and barbarities that must make us wonder about the nature of human nature. My point is that hard hearts are made from opacity, from losing the sense of the Sacred, and this is why it is vital to rediscover the Sacred in our lives and in our times.
And ‘Beauty’ is lost too. The modern world has been described as a ‘flight from beauty’, as, for example, Roger Scruton has said. But why is this so? Because the roots of beauty are ontological: to perceive beauty we must find it in our own soul. The things we know are inscribed in our very being and it is that which resonates and enables us to appreciate true beauty. We no longer know how to see with ‘the eyes of our eyes’ or to hear with ‘the ears of our ears’. We are living in a world that is, in our experience of it, desacralized and disenchanted. “Nor can foot feel, being shod”, writes Hopkins in his poem “God’s Grandeur”. We have “shod” our own souls. We have become so jaded, it is difficult for us to possess a childlike sense of wonder.The children nowadays, who grow up with iPads, commanding the world with a click of a digital switch, are finding it increasingly difficult to perceive the world as enchanted. Things that would have been magical at one time are no longer magical. We have forgotten how to see the wonders of nature, to reconnect with “the dearest freshness deep down things”. So we must rediscover the Sacred through a process of resacralization.
We need to revive faith through a quest for deeper meaning, through a sense of connectedness, a sense of beauty, a sense of harmony and a sense of receptivity to grace, because the gifts of the Sacred cannot be had merely through our own efforts.We must be receptive to transcendence so that we may receive its graces.We must be responsible so that we are ‘able to respond’. ‘Truly God will not change the condition of a people until they first change the condition of their own souls’, says the Qur’an (Qur’an, 13:11). We have a responsibility, therefore, to see, to listen, to feel, and to open our hearts to the Sacred in and all around us.
I will end my talk with a poem which captures some of the spirit of what I have said. It is by the American poet, Edward Estlin Cummings (d. 1962):
i thank You God for most this amazing
day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes
(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun’s birthday; this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings: and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)
how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any—lifted from the no
of all nothing—human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?
(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)
