2 2 S p i r i t ua l i t y S t u d i e s 7 - 1 S p r i n g 2 0 2 1 [A] religious phenomenon will only be recognized as such if it is grasped at its own level, that is to say, if it is studied as something religious. To try to grasp the essence of such a [religious] phenomenon by means of physiology, psychology, sociology, economics, linguistics, art or any other study is false; it misses the one unique and irreducible element in it – the element of the sacred. The Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution and the European Enlightenment – like modernism and its postmodernist prolongation – have fomented the desacralized outlook of the present day. This has given birth to the modern world, whose intellectual posture is unprecedented among human civilizations of the past: It was the emergence of modernity that provided both the scientific concepts and the political language underlying the idea of race. Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, Europe underwent a series of intellectual and social transformations that laid the basis of the modern world. It was the period in which the modern idea of the self, and the individual as a rational agent, began to develop; in which the authority of custom and tradition weakened, while the role of reason in explaining the natural and social world was vastly expanded; in which nature became regarded not as chaotic but as lawful and hence amenable to reason; and in which humans became part of the natural order, and knowledge became secularized. The culmination of this process came in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment … (Malik 2008, 73). What is not commonly understood is that prior to the end of the Middle Ages, the West shared with the East a common mindset which was shaped by an awareness of the sacred. Since the Renaissance, Christendom has seen a decline in its fortunes. This culminated in the so-called Enlightenment which well and truly stamped a modern mentality on the West, thus giving it its characteristic outlook. This development, in turn, gave rise to scientism and the hegemonic worldview that leveled any notion of transcendence. “The ‘great chain of being’ of the Western tradition … survived in the West until it became horizontalized.” (Nasr 1989, 197). This loss created the conditions for scientism to flourish. “Since the Great Chain of Being collapsed with the rise of modern science, something in scientific aims and methods must be inimical to it.” (Smith 1993, xviii). Through these events, the conviction that modern Western civilization was superior to all others had become entrenched. While the eclipse of the sacred began in post-medieval Western Europe, this crisis has since spread throughout the world and humanity is now grappling with its destructive consequences. “[W]ith the collapse of metaphysics, natural theology, and objective revelation, the West is facing for the first time as a civilization the problem of living without objectively convincing absolutes.” (Smith 1967, xiii). It is apt to recall the catastrophic and enduring impact that this has had upon our understanding of the human psyche as we contemplate “the culturally inherited scars from the battle of the last of the nineteenth century when psychological science won its freedom from metaphysics” (May 1958, 8). The discarding of metaphysics in the modern West by scientific materialism has led to the occlusion intellect becoming obscured from our noetic faculty. This has caused a fissure in consciousness, severing the mind from its transpersonal center. This bifurcation has created a void in the human psyche that has proven to be profoundly traumatic (see Perry 2012). The seemingly endless therapies found in modern psychology today are, in essence, by-products of this truncated discipline, which has shown itself unable to provide integrated modes of healing. These ideas have become so deeply assimilated into the modernist mindset, that we can truly say: “Their work is in our bloodstream” (Allport 1968, 14). At its core, the loss of a sense of the sacred has degraded not only the human psyche but our vision of the cosmos, and it continues to have a devastating impact on our well-being: “[O]f all that has thus been forfeited, the loss of the sacred is beyond doubt the most tragic of all: for that proves to be the privation we cannot ultimately survive.” (Smith 2018, 36; see also Nasr 1968). A consequence of undermining the centrality of the Spirit in our lives is the rise of imbalances in the human psyche: “[M]ental disorder today exists everywhere” (Guénon 2001a, 124). Whitall N. Perry (1920–2005) supports this view: “The loss of religion as Center in the world has left a hole which [note: contemporary] psychology is trying to fill.” (1996, 200). If the rehabilitation of psychology should occur, and if we are to move into a truly perennial psychology, then the foundations of modern psychology – especially those of behaviorism and psychoanalysis – need to be understood for what they are: namely, an unbridled assault on what it means to be fully human. As influential psychologist Rollo May (1909–1994) has emphasized, we cannot overlook the seminal influences of modern psychology (1964, 23): [W]e [note: need to] confront directly the work of Sigmund Freud. If we try to bypass Freud we shall be guilty of a kind of suppression. For what Freud thought, wrote and performed in therapy, whether we agree with it or not,
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