2 4 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 that a pre-rational consciousness, given by God and innate in man, does not exist, he not only denied the ‘intellectus’. At the same time, he enclosed man in subjectivism.” (1983, 51). As St. Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) maintains, it is the Intellect that is connected to metaphysical insight. As such, it pertains to a transpersonal mode of knowing which supersedes our sensory perceptions while, at the same time, fully informing them: “[T]he activity of the body has nothing in common with the activity of [note: the] intellect.” (Aquinas 1905, 127). The overthrow of the Intellect by modern science and its psychology is due to their myopic and reductionistic vision of what constitutes a human being. This is made worse by the fact that this subversion has taken place largely unbeknownst to contemporaries. Guénon makes this clear: “[M]odern man has become quite impermeable to any influences other than such as impinge on his senses; not only have his faculties of comprehension become more limited, but also the field of his perception has become correspondingly restricted.” (Guénon 2004b, 101). Since the materialist ascendency that began with the Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution and the so-called Enlightenment, the human psyche and its essential link to the metaphysical order has steadily lost ground in psychology. References to the human soul were increasingly expunged and replaced with the mind. Modern Western psychology, for the most part, has not only completely abandoned its metaphysical origins; first, by rejecting the Spirit and then, by denying the human psyche [6]. Modern psychology has, in fact, gone to the opposite extreme of undermining the role of traditional wisdom on this subject: “Metaphysics should confessedly, as it does really, rest upon psychology instead of conversely.” (Hall 1912, 320). Freud (1989a, 330) went as far as to conclude: “One could venture to explain in this way the myths of paradise and the fall of man, of God, of good and evil, of immortality, and so on, and to transform ‘metaphysics’ into ‘metapsychology’.” It now seeks to cure the mind taken in isolation – it cannot see that separating the human soul from the spiritual domain is the root of the problem. “The word ‘mental’ is often used to indicate the domain which has been explored by [note: modern] Western psychologists and which is often expressed by the world ‘psyche’, so as to avoid metaphysical and religious inferences suggested by the word ‘soul’.” (Klein 2006, 94; see also Reed 1997). This becomes clear when we consider the momentous intellectual currents that emerged during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and which fundamentally changed the Western outlook: The “Enlightenment, when defined as the rational acquisition of knowledge, deals with only one limited aspect of human consciousness – the mental.” (Metzner 1998, 160). By distorting the original meaning of the term psyche, modern psychology has fractured our understanding of soul, a calamity which it has only recently begun to realize in some quarters. James (1913, 348) appeals to the modern secular mindset when he says: “The Soul-theory is, then, a complete superfluity, so far as accounting for the actually verified facts of conscious experience goes. So far, no one can be compelled to subscribe to it for definite scientific reasons.” James (1913, 1) thus defined psychology by embracing the notion of mind but eradicating the soul: “Psychology is the Science of Mental Life, both its phenomena and of their conditions.” However, the figure who first formulated the notion of a psychology without a soul (Lange 1881, 168), which forged the secular foundations of modern psychology, was Friedrich albert Lange (1828–1875), a German philosopher and sociologist. The perennial psychology is diametrically opposed to scientific materialism and the reductionistic treatment of the human psyche. Exponents of modern psychology in many cases still harbor the view that religion and spirituality are unreal, consigning them to the prescientific age of myth and superstition: “Mediaeval tradition has kept psychology from becoming a science. Psychology, up to very recent times, has been held so rigidly under the dominance both of traditional religion and of philosophy – the two great bulwarks of mediaevalism – that it has never been able to free itself and become a natural science.” (Watson 1924, 1). To reject the medieval worldview is, essentially, to discard the role of metaphysics in properly understanding psychology and science. It is to renounce the timeless wisdom of all religions and the perennial psychology: “The kingdom of God is within you” (Luke 17:21), “I am seated in the hearts of all” (Bhagavad Gītā 15:15), or “Heaven and earth cannot contain Me, but the heart of My faithful servant containeth Me.” (Hadīth Qudsī). What is necessary in rehabilitating a science of the soul is to remember that, prior to the emergence of modernism, the vital link between the human and transpersonal orders of reality had been accepted in all times and places. Eliade (1987, 15) states that “[t]he man of the traditional societies [note: and civilizations] is admittedly a ‘homo religiosus’.” He adds that “‘homo religiosus’ represents the ‘total man’” (1969, 8). Modern psychology reduces the human being to homo natura devoid of what transcends his empirical ego and psycho-physical identity. In response to this deviation, a reawakening of what it means to be human needs to be undertaken (see Bendeck Sotillos 2015). Philip Sherrard (1922–1995) writes (1991, 100):
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