From "Man and Nature: Permanence Amidst Apparent Change""

"It is often forgotten that before man began to view his relation to nature only from the aspect of change and impermanence, he had become himself inwardly detached from the immutable principle of the Intellect, the nous, which along with revelation is the only factor that can act as the permanent and immutable axis for the machinations of human reason. With the weakening of gnostic elements in Christianity the rational faculty of Western man became gradually estranged from the twin sources of immutability, stability and permanence: namely, revelation and intellectual intuition. The result was on the one hand the nominalist trend, which destroyed philosophical certainty, and on the other this reduction of man to the purely human cut off from any transcendental elements, the man of Renaissance humanism." - Seyyed Hossein Nasr

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