Like Moses (according to legend), Hegel is the recipient of Kabbalistic wisdom, only it is a Christian Kabbalah, and it is received not directly from God but from Böhme, Oetinger, and the tradition of speculative Pietism. Hegel’s “Kabbalah” is a revelation of eternal truth through the self-unfolding of Absolute Knowledge, the self-grounding display of an organic thought-form that is itself the actualization of God in the world. This revelation of God is at the same time the complete speech of the Whole. It is a reconciliation of faith and scientific knowledge, without following the Kantian route of limiting knowledge to make room for faith. Hegel’s system, furthermore, represents the overcoming of the distinction between the “wise” and the “vulgar,” and the achievement of the classical philosophical ideal of self-knowledge.
Hegel’s science further distinguishes itself from philosophy by containing nothing that could conventionally be called “proof” or argumentation. It is a self-grounding speech. It if, furthermore, a realization of Oetinger’s quest for a “third” form of thought, cutting a middle course between a purely figurative or imaginative approach to the divine and a purely “abstract” one. Hegel’s new form of thought resolves the quarrel between philosophy and mytho-poetic thought. Hegel adopts the Hermetic ideal of a perennial philosophy, treating his dialectic, the “method” of speculation, as a “recollection” of the inchoate wisdom of mankind that has been expressed in art, religion, mythology, and philosophy in imperfect form.
The real power behind dialectic, the power that makes recollection possible, is imagination. Hegel recognizes perennial symbolic forms […] and draws them, in effect, from what Oetinger called sensus communis. His use of them in the architectonic of his system is strikingly similar to the Hermetic “memory magic” of Bruno and others (in particular, as we shall see in chapter 5, that of Ramon Lull). Hegel also engages in a form of analogical reasoning suspiciously like the Hermetic “science Of correspondences.” Recall his attempt to map the forms of the terrestrial world onto the four elements, as well as, most strikingly, the ubiquitous Trinitarian structure. Recall that Oetinger opposed his science of “emblematics” (another variation on the ars memoria) to the modern geometrical, quantitative method. In Hegel we find the two, as might be expected, aufgehoben: the symbolic forms, the “emblems” that animate speculation are themselves “quantitative” (or “quantifiable”) forms. A numerology pervades Hegel’s system, in particular a fascination with Proclean triads.
– Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition (2001), p. 120-2