Apocalypticism and Gnosis inaugurate a new form of thinking which, though submerged by Aristotelian and Scholastic logic, has been preserved into the present and was taken up and further developed by Hegel and Marx. The dialectic is both “dualistic and monistic.” The particular way of thinking" and the “unique concept of development” of apocalypticism and Gnosis is in fact the dialectical method which reconciles the opposition of thesis and antithesis into synthesis within the course of history. However, it is here that Leisegang’s second error creeps in, and its presence is disturbing in what is otherwise such valuable research into these thought patterns. The logic of the dialectic, whether in apocalypticism and Gnosis or in the works of Hegel, is not circular but spiral. The “bending backward” characteristic of the dialectic does not progress back to the thesis in a circular manner but broadens out into a spiral toward the synthesis.

—Jacob Taubes, Occidental Eschatology tr. David Ratmoko (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 35