Desacralization of knowledge

In traditionalist philosophy, desacralization of knowledge or secularization of knowledge is the process of separation of knowledge from its perceived divine source—God or the Ultimate Reality. The process reflects a paradigm shift in modern conception of knowledge in that it has rejected divine revelations as well as the idea of spiritual and metaphysical foundations of knowledge, confining knowledge to empirical domain and reason alone.

The theme of desacralization frequently appears among Traditionalist writers, starting with French metaphysician René Guénon, who earlier spoke of "the limitation of knowledge to its lowest order." Iranian philosopher Seyyed Hossein Nasr most notably examined and defined the process of desacralization of knowledge in his 1981 Gifford Lectures, which were later published as Knowledge and the Sacred.