This section examines the "problematic" legacy of Christian Hermeticism (the third tradition, as Francis Yates argued) and its modern-day conflation with the occult, despite the fact that saints and holy people of the Medieval and Late Antique world, such as Sts. Albertus Magnus and Hildegard von Bingen, wandered into the mystical depths of natural philosophy. 

This section is also an evaluation of "New Age" phenomena alongside the neo-pagan currents of pop cultural trends that threaten to scandalize our domestic churches; and examines further the life and work of Valentin Tomberg, his own prior involvement with Theosophy leading up to his conversion to Catholicism, against the spiritual biography of St. Augustine and his own past heresies.

Divination is a sin (Gensis 44:5, Deuteronomy 18:10), but is all of the Hermetic tradition "divination" per se?  Is the knowledge of natural signs (from which we get so much of Western medical diagnostics) necessarily an occult form of inquiry?  And to what extent did Christians of the pre-modern world understand these distinctions between good and evil uses of natural philosophy? 

In a world where the world was perceived as saturated with spiritual forces, what was off limits and why?  And how can it inform our own approach to technological modernity when the opposite extreme threatens (namely, that there is NO spiritual reality)?

I approach this topic with the desperation of a father who knows the secular world and many church leaders view the natural world in the same way.  My fear is that this harmony with respect to the category of the natural might obscure traditional notions of the supernatural, of God's grace, of Salvation, etc. that feeds so much of the neo-Pelagianism that is increasingly present in many church leaders.

I am of the opinion that metaphysical errors in natural understanding (e.g. Charles Taylor's theory of the "Buffered Self") portend massive obstacles in preaching the life-giving Gospel to a generation that speaks an entirely different language regarding the Divine.

Since we are of the observable world, the natural comes to us more readily and we must come to a clearer understanding of the visible Created Order before we can understand what the Supernatural has revealed to us here below.  "As above, so below", many Platonist thinkers once affirmed, but what happens when Christian and (neo-)Pagan share the same view of the below?

[MORE TO COME!]