Edited by William C. Chittick
Foreword by Huston Smith
Seyyed Hossein Nasr is a world-renowned scholar on Islam, Sufism, and the Perennial Philosophy, and is the author of over fifty books and five hundred articles on topics ranging from comparative religion to traditional Islamic philosophy, cosmology, art, ecology, and mysticism. The Essential Seyyed Hossein Nasr is an anthology of 21 of his most representative essays, including several rare articles which have not been easily available in the U.S., carefully selected and edited by William C. Chittick, a former student of Prof. Nasr and leading scholar of Islam and Sufism.
Source: Worldwisdom.com
Pontifical and Promethean Man (Chapter 17)
The concept of man as the pontiff, pontifex, or bridge between Heaven and earth, which is the traditional view of the anthropos, lies at the antipode of the modern conception of man, which envisages him as the Promethean earthly creature who has rebelled against Heaven and tried to appropriate the role of the Divinity for himself. Pontifical man, who, in the sense used here, is none other than traditional man, lives in a world which has both an Origin and a Center. He lives in full awareness of the Origin which contains his own perfection and whose primordial purity and wholeness he seeks to emulate, recapture, and transmit. He also lives on a circle of whose Center he is always aware and which he seeks to reach in his life, thought, and actions. Pontifical man is the reflection of the Center on the periphery and the echo of the Origin in later cycles of time and generations of history. He is the vicegerent of God (khalifat Allah) on earth, to use the Islamic term, responsible to God for his actions, and the custodian and protector of the earth of which he is given dominion on the condition that he remain faithful to himself as the central terrestrial figure created in the “form of God,” a theomorphic being living in this world but created for eternity. Pontifical man is aware of his role as intermediary between Heaven and earth and his entelechy as lying beyond the terrestrial domain over which he is allowed to rule provided he remains aware of the transient nature of his own journey on earth. Such a man lives in awareness of a spiritual reality which transcends him and yet which is none other than his own inner nature against which he cannot rebel, save by paying the price of separation from all that he is and all that he should wish to be. For such a man, life is impregnated with meaning and the universe peopled with creatures whom he can address as thou. He is aware that precisely because he is human there is both grandeur and danger connected with all that he does and thinks. His actions have an effect upon his own being beyond the limited spatiotemporal conditions in which such actions take place. He knows that somehow the bark which is to take him to the shore beyond after the fleeting journey that comprises his earthly life is constructed by what he does and how he lives while he is in the human state.
