| Author/Contributor(s): | Foster, James |
| Publisher: | Inner Traditions |
| Date: | 8/3/2027 |
| Binding: | Hardcover |
| Condition: | NEW |
• Explores the living path of the Neoplatonic Gnostic Hermetic Christian tradition as a third way between religious fundamentalism and secular materialism
• Reveals how figures like Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Ficino, Pico, and John Dee preserved a transformative metaphysics of consciousness and divine participation
• Provides a practitioner’s guide to contemplative disciplines, sacramental theurgy, and the soul’s ascent toward illumination
The modern West suffers from what James Foster calls ontological amnesia: a systematic forgetting of the participatory cosmos that premodern thinkers inhabited naturally. Foster recovers a third option: a synthesis forged in Roman Alexandria, where Platonic metaphysics, Gnosticism, Hermetic mysticism, and early Christian theology cross-pollinated into something extraordinary, and then went underground.
Foster traces this tradition through four movements: reconstructing the Neoplatonic map of consciousness; reinterpreting Christian doctrine through a Platonic and Gnostic lens; following the golden thread from Pseudo-Dionysius and Augustine through the Renaissance Florentines; and recovering the operative practice of theurgy, divine work mediated through ritual and sacrament, as the living engine of the path. The Christian sacraments are reframed not as mere symbols but as theurgic acts whose efficacy rests on the hierarchical, participatory structure of reality itself.
Eminently practical, the author gives contemplative exercises, daily prayers, and a recovery of the Mass as a transformative rite. The Hermetic Christ provides a spirituality that is intellectually fearless, historically grounded, and genuinely transformative.