The human form cannot be transcended, its sufficient reason being precisely to express the Absolute, hence the untranscendable; and this cuts short the metaphysically and physically aberrant imaginations of the evolutionists, according to whom this form would be the result of a prolonged elaboration starting from animal forms; an elaboration which is at once arbitrary and unlimited. sophiaperennis: Sophia Perennis and the theory of evolution and progress

The ape, for example, is there to show what man is and what he is not, and certainly not to show what he has been; far from being able to be a virtual form of man, the ape incarnates an animal desire to be human, hence a desire of imitation and usurpation; but he finds itself as if before a closed door and falls back all the more heavily into its animality, the perfect innocence of which, it can no longer recapture, if one may make use of such a metaphor; it is as if the animal, prior to the creation of man and to protest against it, had wished to anticipate it, which evokes the refusal of Lucifer to prostrate before Adam. [From the Divine to the Human, p. 98] sophiaperennis: Sophia Perennis and the theory of evolution and progress

Instead of proceeding upward, starting from the corporeal level and passing through the animic sphere, then mounting toward realities at first supraformal and finally principial or metacosmic, an evolving hierarchy is imagined, advancing from matter, through vegetable and animal life, to human consciousness, itself considered as some kind of transitory accident. sophiaperennis: Sophia Perennis and the theory of evolution and progress

Philosophical humanitarianism underestimates the immortal soul just because it overestimates the human animal; it compels people even to denigrate saints that they may the better be able to whitewash criminals; the one seems unable to go without the other. From this results oppression of those of contemplative bent from their most tender years: in the name of egalitarianism vocations are blurred and geniuses are worn down, by schools in particular and by official worldliness in general; every spiritual element is banished from professional and public life [NA: On the other hand, by a kind of compensation, professional life more and more assumes a "religious" air in the sense that it claims the whole of man, his soul as well as his time, as though the sufficient reason for the human condition were some economic enterprise and not immortality.] and this amounts to removing from life a great part of its content and condemning religion to a slow death. sophiaperennis: Sophia Perennis and the theory of evolution and progress

To return to what was said above about the understanding of ideas, a theoretical notion may be compared to the view of an object. Just as this view does not reveal all possible aspects, or in other words the integral nature of the object, the perfect knowledge of which would be nothing less than identity with it, so a theoretical notion does not itself correspond to the integral truth, of which it necessarily suggests only one aspect, essential or otherwise. [NA: In a treatise directed against rationalist philosophy, El-Ghazzâli speaks of certain blind men who, not having even a theoretical knowledge of an elephant, came across this animal one day and started to feel the different parts of its body; as a result each man represented the animal to himsel f according to the limb which he touched: for the first, who touched a foot, the elephant resembled a column, whereas for the second, who touched one of the tusks, it resembled a stake, and so on. By this parable El-Ghazzâli seeks to show the error involved in trying to enclose the universal within a fragment ary notion of it, or within isolated and exclusive ’aspects’ or ’points of view’. Shri Ramakrishna also uses this parable to demonstrate the inadequacy of dogmatic exclusiveness in its negative aspect. The same idea could however be expressed by means of an even more adequate example: faced with any object, some might say that it ’is’ a certain shape, while others might say that it ’is’ such and such a material; others again might maintain that it ’is’ such and such a number or such and such a weight and so forth. 2. The Angels are intelligences which are limited to a particular ’aspect’ of Divinity; consequently an angelic state is a sort of transcendent ’point of view’. On a lower plane, the ’intellectuality’ of animals and of the more peripheral species of the terrestrial state, that of plants for example, corresponds cosmologically to the angelic intellectuality: what differentiates one vegetable species from another is in reality simply the mode of its ’intelligence’; in other words, it is the form or rather the integral nature of a plant which reveals the state - eminently passive of course - of contemplation or knowledge of its species; we say ’of its species’ advisedly, because, considered in isolation, a plant does not constitute an individual. We would recall here that the Intellect, being universal, must be discoverable in everything that exists, to whatever order it belongs; the same is not true of reason, which is only a specifi cally human faculty and is in no way identical with intelligence, either our own or that of other beings.] sophiaperennis: What is dogmatism?

Wearied by the artifices and the lack of imagination of academic rationalism, many of our contemporaries in rejecting it reject true metaphysics as well, because they think it "abstract" - which in their minds is synonymous with "artificial" - and seek the "concrete," not beyond the rational and in the order of ontological prototypes, but in crude fact, in the sensory, the "actual"; man becomes the arbitrary measure of everything, and thereby abdicates his dignity as man, namely his possibility of objective and universal knowledge. He is then the measure of things not in a truly human but in an animal way; his dull empiricism is that of an animal which registers facts and notices a pasture or a path; but since he is despite all a "human animal," he disguises his dullness in mental arabesques. The existentialists are human as it were by chance; what distinguishes them from animals is not human intelligence but the human style of an infra-human intelligence. The protagonists of "concrete" thought, of whatever shade, readily label as "speculations in the abstract" whatever goes beyond their understanding, but they forget to tell us why these speculations are possible, that is to say what confers this strange possibility on human intelligence. Thus what does it mean that for thousands of years men deemed to be wise have practiced such speculations, and by what right does one call "intellectual progress" the replacement of these speculations by a crude empiricism which excludes on principle any operation characteristic of intelligence? If these "positivists" are right, none but they are intelligent; all the founders of religions, all the saints, all the sages have been wrong on essentials whereas Mr. So-and-So at long last sees things clearly; one might just as well say that human intelligence does not exist. There are those who claim that the idea of God is to be explained only by social opportunism, without taking account of the infinite disproportion and the contradiction involved in such a hypothesis; if such men as Plato, Aristotle   or Thomas Aquinas   - not to mention the Prophets, or Christ or the sages of Asia - were not capable of noticing that God is merely a social prejudice or some other dupery of the kind, and if hundreds and thousands of years have been based intellectually on their incapacity, then there is no human intelligence, and still less any possibility of progress, for a being absurd by nature does not contain the possibility of ceasing to be absurd. sophiaperennis: Existentialism

Man is often just an animal which - as if by chance - possesses a human brain. A cow is well aware in her own fashion that she exists and grazes where she will; that is not difficult to say in human language; but before the existentialists no one had the audacity to class as wisdom this perception of his own existence and of his freedom to choose between apples and pears. sophiaperennis: Kierkegaard  , Nietzsche  , Klages and others like them.

There is no difficulty in the fact that pure intelligence - the intellect - immensely surpasses thought, and that there is no continuity - despite the identity of essence - between a concept as such and reality, the aseity of the real; to lament over the shortcomings of thought is to ask it to be something that it is not; this is the classical error of philosophers who seek to enclose everything in the cogito alone. From the point of view of concrete - not abstract - knowledge of the transcendent, the problem of thought is resolved in the very nature of the intellect. There are objects which exceed the possibilities of reason; there are none which exceed those of intelligence as such. If there were not something absolute in man - he is "made in the image of God" - he would be only an animal like other animals; but man knows the animals, while they do not know man. Man alone can step out of the cosmos, and this possibility proves - and presupposes - that in a certain way he incarnates the Absolute. [NA: Without this quality of absoluteness there could be no question either of his salvation or of his damnation.] sophiaperennis: What is the intellect and Intellection?

To return to what was said above about the understanding of ideas, a theoretical notion may be compared to the view of an object. Just as this view does not reveal all possible aspects, or in other words the integral nature of the object, the perfect knowledge of which would be nothing less than identity with it, so a theoretical notion does not itself correspond to the integral truth, of which it necessarily suggests only one aspect, essential or otherwise. [NA: In a treatise directed against rationalist philosophy, El-Ghazzâli speaks of certain blind men who, not having even a theoretical knowledge of an elephant, came across this animal one day and started to feel the different parts of its body; as a result each man represented the animal to himsel f according to the limb which he touched: for the first, who touched a foot, the elephant resembled a column, whereas for the second, who touched one of the tusks, it resembled a stake, and so on. By this parable El-Ghazzâli seeks to show the error involved in trying to enclose the universal within a fragment ary notion of it, or within isolated and exclusive ’aspects’ or ’points of view’. Shri Ramakrishna also uses this parable to demonstrate the inadequacy of dogmatic exclusiveness in its negative aspect. The same idea could however be expressed by means of an even more adequate example: faced with any object, some might say that it ’is’ a certain shape, while others might say that it ’is’ such and such a material; others again might maintain that it ’is’ such and such a number or such and such a weight and so forth.] In the example just given error corresponds to an inadequate view of the object whereas a dogmatic conception is comparable to the exclusive view of one aspect of the object, a view which supposes the immobility of the seeing subject. sophiaperennis: What is the understanding of an idea?

From a certain point of view, the Christian argument is the historicity of the Christ-Saviour, whereas the Platonic or "Aryan" argument is the nature of things or the Immutable. If, to speak symbolically, all men are in danger of drowning as a consequence of the fall of Adam, the Christian saves him-sell by grasping the pole held out to him by Christ, whereas the Platonist saves himself by swimming; but neither course weakens or neutralizes the effectiveness of the other. On the one hand there are certainly men who do not know how to swim or who are prevented from doing so, but on the other hand swimming is undeniably among the possibilities open to man; the whole thing is to know what counts most in any situation whether individual or collective.6 We have seen that Hellenism, like all directly or indirectly sapiential doctrines, is founded on the axiom man - intelligence rather than man - will, and that is one of the reasons why it had to appear as inoperative in the eyes of a majority of Christians; but only of a majority because the Christian gnostics could not apply such a reproach to the Pythagoreans and Platonists; the gnostics could not do otherwise than admit the primacy of the intellect, and for that reason the idea of divine redemption meant to them something very different from and more far-reaching than a mysticism   derived from history and a sacramental dogmatism. It is necessary to repeat once more - as others have said before and better - that sacred facts are true because they retrace on their own plane the nature of things, and not the other way round: the nature of things is not real or normative because it evokes certain sacred facts. The principles, essentially accessible to pure intelligence - if they were not so man would not be man, and it is almost blasphemy to deny that human intelligence considered in relation to animal intelligence has a supernatural side - the universal principles confirm the sacred facts, which in their turn reflect those principles and derive their efficacy from them; it is not history, whatever it may contain, that confirms the principles. This relationship is expressed by the Buddhists when they say that spiritual truth is situated beyond the distinction between objectivity and subjectivity, and that it derives its evidence from the depths of Being itself, or from the innateness of Truth in all that is. In the sapiential perspective the divine redemption is always present; it pre-exists all terrestrial alchemy   and is its celestial model, so that it is always thanks to this eternal redemption - whatever may be its vehicle on earth - that man is freed from the weight of his vagaries and even, Deo volente, from that of his separative existence; if "my Words shall not pass away" it is because they have always been. The Christ of the gnostics is he who is "before Abraham was" and from whom arise all the ancient wisdoms; a consciousness of this, far from diminishing a participation in the treasures of the historical Redemption, confers on them a compass that touches the very roots of Existence. sophiaperennis: Platonism   and Christianity

It is necessary to dissipate here an error which would have it that everything in nature is beautiful and everything of traditional production is likewise beautiful because it belongs to tradition; according to this view, ugliness does not exist either in the animal or the vegetable kingdoms, since, it seems, every creature "is perfectly what it should be", which has really no connection with the aesthetic question; likewise it is said that the most magnificent of sanctuaries possesses no more beauty than some tool or other, always because the tool "is everything that it should be". This is tantamount to maintaining not only that an ugly animal species is aesthetically the equivalent of a beautiful species, but also that beauty is such merely through the absence of ugliness and not through its own content, as if the beauty of a man were the equivalent of that of a butterfly, or of a flower or a precious stone. Beauty, however, is a cosmic quality which cannot be reduced to abstractions foreign to its nature; likewise, the ugly is not only that which is not completely what it is supposed to be, nor is it only an accidental infirmity or a lack of taste; it is in everything which manifests, accidentally or substantially, artificially or naturally, a privation of ontological truth, of existential goodness, or, what amounts to the same, of reality. Ugliness is, very paradoxically, the manifestation of a relative nothingness: of a nothingness which can affirm itself only by denying or eroding an element of Being, and thus of beauty. This amounts to saying that, in a certain fashion and speaking elliptically, the ugly is less real than the beautiful, and in short that it exists only thanks to an underlying beauty which it disfigures; in a word, it is the reality of an unreality, or the possibility of an impossibility, like all privative manifestations. sophiaperennis: FOUNDATIONS OF AN INTEGRAL AESTHETICS

The vocation sine qua non of man is to be spiritual. Spirituality manifests itself on the planes which constitute man, namely intelligence, will, affectivity, production: human intelligence is capable of transcendence, of the absolute, of objectivity; the human will is capable of liberty, and thus of conformity to what is grasped by the intelligence; human feeling (affectivity), which is joined to each of the preceding faculties, is capable of compassion and generosity, by reason of the objectivity of the human mind, which takes the soul out of its animal egoism. Finally, there is the specifically human capacity for production, and it is because of this that man has been called homo faber, and not homo sapiens only: it is the capacity for producing tools and constructing dwellings and sanctuaries, and if need be for making clothes and creating works of art, and also for spontaneously combining in these creations symbolism and harmony. The language of harmony may be simple or rich, depending on needs, perspectives and temperaments; decoration too has its purpose, both from the point of view of symbolism, and from that of musicality. This amounts to saying that this fourth capacity must also have a spiritual content on pain of not being human; its role moreover is simply to exteriorize the three preceding capacities by adapting them to material needs or the needs of worship, or let us simply say by projecting them into the sensible order otherwise than by rational discourse or writing. Exiled on earth as we are, unless we are able to content ourselves with that shadow of Paradise that is virgin nature, we must create for ourselves surroundings which by their truth and their beauty recall our heavenly origin and thereby also awaken our hope. sophiaperennis: THE DEGREES OF ART

Dress exteriorizes either the spiritual or social function, or the soul: and these two aspects may be combined. Clothing is opposed to nakedness as the soui is opposed to the body, or as the spiritual function - the priestly function for example - is opposed to animal nature. When clothing is combined with nakedness - as in the case of the Hindus, for example, - then the latter appears in its qualitative and sacred aspect. sophiaperennis: AESTHETICS AND SYMBOLISM IN ART AND NATURE

To say that man, and consequently the human body, is made in the image of God," means a priori that it manifests something absolute and for that very reason something unlimited and perfect. What above all distinguishes the human form from animal forms, is its direct reference to absoluteness, indicated by its vertical posture; as a result, if animal forms can be transcended - they are by man, precisely - such could not be the case for the human form; the human form marks not only the summit of earthly creatures, but also - and for that very reason - the exit from their condition, or from the Samsâra as the Buddhists would say. To see man, is to see not only the image of God, but also a door open towards Bodhi, liberating Illumination; or let us say towards a blessed fixing in the divine Proximity. sophiaperennis: The Message of the Human Body

This allusion to the primordial androgyne - which divided in two well before the successive entry of its halves into matter [NA: And which is realized a posteriori in sexual union.] - permits us to insert a parenthesis here. The human form cannot be transcended, its sufficient reason being precisely to express the Absolute, hence the untranscendable; and this cuts short the metaphysically and physically aberrant imaginations of the evolutionists, according to whom this form would be the result of a prolonged elaboration starting from animal forms; an elaboration which is at once arbitrary and unlimited. Materialists, even those who consider transformist evolution inexplicable and even contradictory, accept this hypothesis as an indispensable idea, which moreover carries us outside of science and into philosophy, or more exactly into rationalism with its reasonings cut off from the very roots of knowledge; and if the evolutionist idea is indispensable to them, it is because in their minds it replaces the concept of a sudden creation ex nihilo, which to them seems the only other possible solution. In reality, the evolutionist hypothesis is unnecessary because the creationist concept is so as well; for the creature appears on earth, not by falling from heaven, but by progressively passing - starting from the archetype - from the subtle to the material world, materialization being brought about within a kind of visible aura quite comparable to the "spheres of light" which, according to many accounts, introduce and terminate celestial apparitions. [NA: One will recall the " chariot of fire" that lifted up Elijah, and the "cloud" which veiled the Christ during the Ascension.] sophiaperennis: The Message of the Human Body

What we have just said results moreover from the bodily form: first of all, the feminine body is far too perfect and spiritually too eloquent to be no more than a kind of transitory accident; and then, due to the fact that it is human, it communicates in its own way the same message as the masculine body, namely, we repeat, the absolutely Real and thereby the victory over the "round of births and deaths;" thus the possibility of leaving the world of illusion and suffering. The animal, which can manifest perfections but not the Absolute, is like a closed door, as it were enclosed in its own perfection; whereas man is like an open door allowing him to escape his limits, which are those of the world rather than his own. sophiaperennis: The Message of the Human Body

The human body comprises three fundamental regions: the body properly so-called, the head, the sexual parts; these are almost three different subjectivities. The head represents both intellectual and individual subjectivity; the body, collective and archetypal subjectivity, that of masculinity or femininity or that of race or caste; finally, the sexual parts manifest, quite paradoxically, a dynamic subjectivity at once animal and divine, if one may express it thus. In other words, the face expresses a thought, a becoming aware of something, a truth; the body, for its part, expresses a being, an existential synthesis; and the sexual parts, a love both creative and liberat ing: mystery of the generous substance that unfolds in the accidents, and of the blessed accidents that flow back towards the substance; glory of self-giving and glory of delivering. The human body in its integrality is intelligence, existence, love; certitude, serenity and faith. sophiaperennis: The Message of the Human Body

One of the functions of dress is, no doubt, to isolate mental subjectivity, that which thinks and speaks, from the two existential subjectivities which risk disturbing the message of thought with their own messages; but this is nonetheless a question of temperament and custom, more or less primordial man having in this respect reflexes other than those of man too marked by the fall; of man become at once too cerebral and too passional, and having lost much of his beauty and also his innocence. The gait of the human being is as evocative as his vertical posture; whereas the animal is horizontal and only advances towards itself - that is, it is enclosed within its own form - man, in advancing, transcends himself; even his forward movement seems vertical, it denotes a pilgrimage towards his Archetype, towards the celestial Kingdom, towards God. The beauty of the anterior side of the human body indicates the nobleness, on the one hand of man’s vocational end, and on the other hand of his manner of approaching it; it indicates that man directs himself towards God and that he does so in a manner that is "humanly divine," if one may say so. But the posterior side of the body also has its meaning: it indicates, on the one hand the noble innocence of the origin, and on the other hand the noble manner of leaving behind himself what has been transcended; it expresses, positively, whence we have come and, negatively, how we turn our backs to what is no longer ourselves. Man comes from God and he goes towards God; but at the same time, he draws away from an imperfection which is no longer his own and draws nearer to a perfection which is not yet his. His "becoming" bears the imprint of a "being"; he is that which he becomes, and he becomes that which he is. sophiaperennis: The Message of the Human Body

We have alluded above to the evolutionist error which was inevitable in connection with our considerations on the deiformity of man, and which permits us here to insert a parenthesis. The animal, vegetable and mineral species not only manifest qualities or combinations of qualities, they also manifest defects or combinations of defects; this is required by All-Possibility, which on pain of being limited - of not being what it is - must also express "possible impossibilities," or let us say negative and paradoxical possibilities; it implies in consequence excess as well as privation, thereby emphasizing norms by means of contrasts. In this respect, the ape, for example, is there to show what man is and what he is not, and certainly not to show what he has been; far from being able to be a virtual form of man, the ape incarnates an animal desire to be human, hence a desire of imitation and usurpation; but he finds itself as if before a closed door and falls back all the more heavily into its animality, the perfect innocence of which, it can no longer recapture, if one may make use of such a metaphor; it is as if the animal, prior to the creation of man and to protest against it, had wished to anticipate it, which evokes the refusal of Lucifer to prostrate before Adam. [NA: According to the Talmud   and the Koran  .] This does not prevent the ape from being sacred in India, perhaps on account of its anthropomorphism, or more likely in virtue of associations of ideas due to an extrinsic symbolism; [NA: As was the case for the boar, which represents sacerdotal authority for the Nordics; or as the rhinoceros symbolizes the sannyâsi.] this also would explain in part the role played by the apes in the Ramayana, unless in this case it is a question of subtle creatures - the jinn of Islam - of whom the ape is only a likeness. [NA: The story recounted in the Râmayana is situated at the end of the " silver age" (Treta- Yuga) and consequently in a climate of possibilities quite different from that of the " iron age" (Kali- Yuga); the partition between the material and animic states was not yet " hardened" or " congealed" as is above all the case in our epoch.] One may wonder whether the intrinsically noble animals, hence those directly allowing of a positive symbolism, are not themselves also theophanies; they are so necessarily, and the same holds true for given plants, minerals, cosmic or terrestrial phenomena, but in these cases the theomorphism is partial and not integral as in man. The splendor of the stag excludes that of the lion, the eagle cannot be the swan, nor the water lily the rose, nor the emerald the sapphire; from a somewhat different point of view , we would say that the sun doubtless manifests in a direct and simple manner the divine Majesty, but that it has neither life nor spirit; [NA: It can nevertheless have a sacrament al function with regard to men who are sensitive to cosmic barakah.] only man is the image-synthesis of the Creator, [NA: And this in spite of the loss of the earthly paradise. One of the effects of what monotheist symbolism calls the " fall of Adam," was the separation between the soul and the body, conjointly with the separation between heaven and earth and between the spirit and the soul. The " resurrection of the flesh" is none other than the restoration of the primordial situation; as the body is an immanent virtuality of the soul, it can be remanifested as soon as the separative " curse" has drawn to its close, which coincides with the end of a great cycle of humanity.] owing to the fact that he possesses the intellect - hence also reason and language - and that he manifests it by his very form. sophiaperennis: The Message of the Human Body

In all this wish to accumulate knowledge of relative things, the metaphysical dimension - which alone takes us out of the vicious circle of the phenomenal and the absurd - is expressly put aside; it is as if a man were endowed with all possible faculties of perception minus intelligence; or again, it is as if one believed that an animal endowed with sight were more capable than a blind man of understanding the mysteries of the world. The science of our time knows how to measure galaxies and split atoms, but it is incapable of the least investigation beyond the sensible world, so much so that outside its self-imposed but unrecognized limits it remains more ignorant than the most rudimentary magic. [Treasures of Buddhism, p. 42]. sophiaperennis: Limits of modern science

All errors concerning the world and God consist either in a "naturalistic" denial of the discontinuity [between God and the world] and so also of transcendence [NA: It is mainly this "scientific" prejudice, going hand in hand with a falsification and impoverishment of speculative imagination, which prevents a man like Teilhard de Chardin from conceiving the overriding discontinuity between matter and the soul, or between the natural and the supernatural orders and so leads to the evolutionary outlook, which — inverting the truth — makes everything begin with matter. A minus always presupposed an initial plus so that a seeming evolution is no more than the quite provisional unfolding of a preexisting result; the human embryo becomes a man because that is what it already is; no "evolution" will produce a man from an animal embryo. In the same way the whole cosmos can only spring from an embryonic state which contains the virtuality of all its possible deployment and simply makes manifest on the plane of contingencies an infinitely higher and transcendent prototype.] — whereas it is on the basis of this transcendence that the whole edifice of science should have been raised — or else in a failure to understand the metaphysical and ’descending’ continuity which in no way abolishes the discontinuity starting from the relative... [Understanding Islam, p. 109]. sophiaperennis: Science and negation of Transcendence

To believe, with certain ’neo-yogists’, that ’evolution’ will produce a superman ’who will differ from a man as much as man differs from the animal or the animal from the vegetable’ is a case of not knowing what man is. Here is one more example of a pseudo-wisdom which deems itself vastly superior to the ’separatist’ religions, but which in point of fact shows itself more ignorant than the most elementary catechisms. For the most elementary catechism does know what man is: it knows that by his qualities, and as an autonomous world, he stands opposed to the other kingdoms of nature taken together; it knows that in one particular respect — that of spiritual possibilities, not that of animal nature — the difference between a monkey and a man is infinitely greater than that between a fly and a monkey. For man alone is able to leave the world; man alone is able to return to God; and that is the reason why he cannot in any way be surpassed by a new earthly being. Among the beings of this earth man is the central being; this is an absolute position; there cannot be a center more central than the center, if definitions have any meanings. sophiaperennis: The Sophia Perennis and Neo-spiritualism

As to individual prayer, grounds for its existence are incontestably to be found in our nature, since individuals do in fact differ from one another and have different destinies and desires. The aim of this prayer is not only to obtain particular favors, but also the purification of the soul : it loosens psychological knots or, in other words, dissolves subconscious coagulations and drains away many secret poisons ; it eternalizes before God the difficulties, failures and distortions of the soul, always supposing the prayer to be humble and genuine, and this externalization — carried out in relation to the Absolute — has the virtue of reestablishing equilibrium and restoring peace, in a word, of opening us to grace. [NA: The Christian sacrament of confession is founded on these data, and is an addition balanced by the action of a special celestial grace (absolution). Psychoanalysis offers an analogous process, but one satanic in form, for it replaces the supernatural by the infra-natural : in the place of God, it puts nature with all its blind, dark and inhuman aspects. For psychoanalysts evil is not what is contrary to God and to the final ends of man, but what troubles the soul, however beneficial the cause of disquiet may be ; further, the equilibrium resulting from psychoanalysis is basically of an animal order, and this is entirely contrary to the requirements of our immortality. In man, his disequilibria can and must be resolved with a view to a higher equilibrium, conformable to a spiritual hierarchy of values, and not in some quasi-vegetative state of bliss; a human evil cannot be cured apart from God. (Stations of Wisdom, p. 125-126).] sophiaperennis: The Sophia Perennis and Neo-spiritualism

A most striking feature of the North American branch of the Primordial Sanatana Dharma is the doctrine of the four years: the sacred animal of the Plains-Indians, the buffalo, symbolizes the Mahayuga, each of its legs representing a Yuga. At the beginning of this Mahayuga a buffalo was placed by the Great Spirit at the West in order to hold back the water which menace the earth. Every year this bison loses a hear, and in very Yuga it loses a foot. When it will have lost all its hair, and its feet, the water will overwhelm the earth and the Mahayuga will be finished. the analogy with the bull of Dharma in Hinduism is very remarkable; at every Yuga, this bill withdraws a foot, and spirituality loses its strength; and now we are near the end of the kali-yuga. Like the orthodox Hindus, the traditional Red Indians have this conviction, which is obviously true in spite of all the mundane optimism of the modern world; but let us add that the compensation of our very dark age is the Mercy of the Holy Name, as it is emphasized in the Maneuver Dharma Shasta and the Trimmed Bhagavata and other holy scriptures. sophiaperennis: His Holiness and the Red Indian