Kabbalah and Gnosticism

The text on Kabbalah and Gnosticism belongs to Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's Lectures on the History of Philosophy (Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie). It is not an independent essay but part of a university lecture course delivered between 1805 and 1831 and published posthumously from students' lecture notes and Hegel's manuscripts, chiefly edited by Karl Ludwig Michelet. The passage appears in Part One: Greek Philosophy, within Section Three: Neoplatonists, subsection B. Kabbalah and Gnosticism.
In Kabbalah and Gnosticism, Hegel interprets both Jewish Kabbalah and Gnosticism as attempts to think the transition from the indeterminate Absolute to concrete reality. In both cases, the point of departure is a supreme, unknowable, and indeterminate principle, the Kabbalistic En Soph or the ineffable God of the Gnostics, from which proceeds a series of emanations or manifestations. Hegel observes that these doctrines share the same speculative necessity: to comprehend how the absolute One externalizes itself into multiplicity without forfeiting its unity, and how the finite can return to its divine origin.
At the same time, Hegel maintains that both Kabbalah and Gnosticism remain confined to imaginative, symbolic, and often obscure forms of thought. Although he recognizes in them a profound philosophical impulse, the attempt to determine the Absolute concretely and to explain the relation between God, the world, and spirit, he argues that their constructions ultimately degenerate into cosmological and theosophical fantasies. Nevertheless, Hegel regards these traditions as a historically significant stage in the development of philosophical and religious consciousness, since they give explicit expression to the problem of mediating between the Absolute and the finite world.
Translated directly from the German by Lucas Praxedes from the text found in Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie. Translation notes are indicated throughout the text by “(Tr.)”.