“For a long time now, religion in the West has been polarized between a democratic kind of faith meant for simple believers, and divine mysteries so high that hardly anyone can claim to know much about them. The vital connecting link between them, that of metaphysical religion, is all but lost…” (From the Introduction.)
Many books try to answer the fundamental questions of life: Who am I? Does life have a purpose? How should I live? Keys of Gnosis brings to these universal questions an extraordinary degree of metaphysical insight. It contains in highly condensed form a veritable library of traditional wisdom, offering a systematic reconstruction of our understanding of the soul and its relation to archetypal reality. Its starting-point is the fact that increasing numbers of people seem to lack spiritual and material power over their own lives. Modern man feels like a victim. But true power, real freedom, is closer than we think. Our mistake lies in accepting a false view of the self, and neglecting the metaphysical dimension that gives access to eternity. The book offers nothing less than a crash-course in liberation from the profoundly false notion of reality that is hold us in unconscious servitude to time and appearance. It’s profound philosophy of religion offers a radically enlarged idea of the self and its mediating role between God and the world. It shows how we can be agents of Providence, that our highest fulfillment lies in our archetypal status as the third member of the “Great Triad” together with God and Nature. It defends the capacity of our minds to gain objective insight despite the obfuscations of post-modernism. In doing so, it represents a bold development of the Platonist tradition associated with St Augustine, Plotinus, and Proclus.
Praise
“This book is like a diamond: a diamond placed not in a necklace, but at the business end of a drill. It is up to us to use the drill to penetrate reality. Writing the book was a great achievement. Reading it invites us to make the achievement our own.”—Stratford Caldecott, G.K. Chesterton Institute for Faith & Culture
“This work provides a compelling metaphysical framework that helps to uncover the fissures in the fabric of the modern world. Through a robust critique of today’s profane ideologies, Bolton exposes false views of self and questions our conventional notions of ordinary life through recourse to a transcendent wisdom.”—Samuel Bendeck Sotillos, PsyD, LMFT, LPCC, practicing psychotherapist, author ofThe Quest For Who We Are: Modern Psychology and the Sacred
About the Author
Robert Bolton was educated in the sciences and developed a strong interest in traditional metaphysics, obtaining from Exeter University the degrees of M.Phil and Ph.D. He is the author of The Order of the Ages: The Hidden Laws of World History, The Logic of Spiritual Values, Self and Spirit, The One and the Many: A Defense of Theistic Religion, Foundations of Free Will, and Person, Soul, and Identity: Philosophy and the Real Self. All these books are written from the point of view of traditional wisdom, and not tradition for its own sake—for in a world where wisdom is disregarded in favor of power, this point of view keeps all of its relevance. Bolton also contributed regularly to the journal Sacred Web, in which unfolded epistolary exchanges with traditionalist author Charles Upton that may be found in the latter’s book, Knowings in the Arts of Metaphysics, Cosmology, and the Spiritual Path. Bolton was a member of the Church of England until the 1960s, when, having observed how willingly that Church was accepting the changes demanded by modern secularism, he converted to the Catholic Church, and to the reality of sacred tradition, which gave him the confidence to write the kind of philosophy he believed the modern world sorely needed. Well-known author Stratford Caldecott credits his first steps toward conversion to Catholicism to Robert Bolton.
