To summarize, the doctrines of the Hermetica that became enduring features of the Hermetic tradition can be enumerated as follows:
1. God requires creation in order to be God.
2. God is in some sense “completed” or has a need fulfilled through man’s contemplation of Him.
3. Illumination involves capturing the whole of reality in a complete, encyclopedic speech.
4. Man can perfect himself through gnosis: he becomes empowered through the possession of the complete speech.
5. Man can know the aspects or “moments” of God.
6. An initial stage of purification in which the initiate is purged of false intellectual standpoints is required before the reception of the true doctrine.
7. The universe is an internally related whole pervaded by cosmic energies.
To make clear the parallels between these doctrines and Hegel’s, here is a preview of what I will be arguing in the rest of this book:
1. Hegel holds that God’s being involves “creation,” the subject matter of his Philosophy of Nature. Nature is a moment of God’s being.
2. Hegel holds that God is in some sense “completed” or actualized through the intellectual activity of mankind: “Philosophy” is the final stage in the actualization of Absolute Spirit. Hegel holds the “circular” conception of God and of the cosmos I referred to earlier, involving God “returning to Himself” and truly becoming God through man.
3. Hegel’s philosophy is encyclopedic: he aims to end philosophy, for all intents and purposes, by capturing the whole of reality in a complete, circular speech.
4. Hegel believes that we rise above nature and become masters of our own destiny through the profound gnosis provided by his system.
5. Hegel’s Logic is an attempt to know the aspects or “moments” of God as a system of ideas. In a famous passage of the Science of Logic, Hegel states that the Logic “is to be understood as the system of pure reason, as the realm of pure thought. This realm is truth as it is without veil and in its own absolute nature. It can therefore be said that this content is the exposition of God as He is in his eternal essence before the creation of nature and a finite Spirit” […].
6. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit represents, in the Hegelian system, an initial stage of purification in which the would-be philosopher is purged of false intellectual standpoints so that he might receive the true doctrine of Absolute Knowing (Logic-Nature-Spirit).
7. Hegel’s account of nature rejects the philosophy of mechanism. He upholds what the followers of Bradley would later call a doctrine of “internal relations” as against the typical, modern mechanistic understanding of things in terms of “external relations.”
– Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition (2001), pp. 13-4