possessed meaning and purpose wherein he himself participated and was touched personally by it. Such a synthetic worldview was methodologically possible because man found the terms by which he could understand the world within himself. Astrology and angelology provided a universal terminology integrating all disciplines. Since angels and deities were the spiritual intelligences of celestial bodies, both angelology and astrology more or less conflate into one another. In fact, they capture real knowledge about the archetypes and laws of human psychology. Through them, our forefathers attempted to elucidate everything in the surrounding nature, including the minerals and the constellations. Everything was explained through spiritual signatures. For example, every animal represented one virtue or vice, and even metals were classified by means of the same spiritual qualities in alchemy. The modern era has developed an extroverted science, shifting the emphasis from inner intuitions to outer senses. This kind of sensualistic science achieved extraordinary progress in exploring the material world, but has lost sight of spiritual wisdom. It disintegrated into specializations, none of which can grasp the whole. In the eyes of modern science, man is no longer the pivot of the universe. He is but a random product of evolution on the fringe of the dead and cold distances of interstellar dust. He is no longer a dignified lord of himself, but a puppet driven by the tricks of genes and hormones. His conscience and moral concepts are no longer rooted in the exalted depths of the supreme intelligence of the Creator anymore – they are but transient and fallible schemes inculcated in the young by society. The self-understanding of modern man has already brought about a lot of destructive consequences. In the 20th century it caused two political disasters with 150 million victims. Genetic determinism steered mankind towards eugenics and Nazism. As proclaimed by Hitler’s deputy, Rudolf Hess, Nazism was “nothing but [the] applied biology” of its time (Black 2003, 270). On the other hand, social determinism led to communism. Both were based on the assumption that there is no spiritual individuality in man, no innate dignity, no eternal spark from heaven; rather, man results merely from the forces of heredity and environment. Therefore, man can be bred or moulded by re-education into an arbitrary form useful to the state. Primitive nations understood nature as animated and sacred, and themselves as the mesh in an invisible web of connexions, where the spirits of nature punished every sin and separation from the whole by misfortune. The separation of mental processes and linearity of utilitarian thinking in the modern era have made for the destruction of the environment by the economic activity of man. The perception of man as a machine, begun by Descartes, implied on the one hand the feeling of powerlessness in regard to our own body seemingly not related to our psyche. On the other hand, it went so far as to grow human embryos for industrial purposes and disassemble and sell living humans for organs (components). Absence of a higher goal and ideals in Spirituality Studies 1 (1) Spring 2015 39 (3)
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MzgxMzI=