Secret Places And Elder Races

"The secret places. All rational beings have them and guard them - not only for their own sakes but for those of others. Who but God would love us if all the secret places of our minds lay exposed?"
-Julian May, Intervention (London, 1988), 20, p. 166.

This is the theme of Poul Anderson's "Journeys End."

In May's Galactic Milieu, one species thinks that the elder race has survived from a previous universe, as in Anderson's Tau Zero and The Avatar. Another thinks that they are angelic like CS Lewis eldila or the fallen angels in James Blish's Black Easter.