ABSTRACT
Alchemical and Kabbalistic signatures allowed Creation to be read at one and the same axiologically and as a divine Entfaltung, in which everything – minerals, vegetable and animal life – could find a place. Though the Cambridge Platonists seem a sturdy academic lot, they freely applied Neoplatonic, Hermetic, and Christian Kabbalistic insights in quest for a true Christianity of eternal truth and morality only accessible by mystical illumination. The ancient Hermes, taken as philosophy not myth, was firmly domesticated into Christianity, and it was only beginning to dawn on religious thinkers that the Hermetica, given Isaac Casaubon's philological researches, belonged alongside Gnostic heretics. There will be some honoring of the Gnostic inheritance in theology, but Pietist suspicions on the one hand and more rationalist approaches on the other will want anything smacking of magic, personal illuminism, as well as astrology and alchemy pushed aside.
