The Endless Trace: The Passionate Pursuit of Wisdom in the West Book

Two powerful motives weave beneath the surface of our spiritual history: the desire to know and the desire to love. The secret history of the West is the story of saints, mystics, alchemists, poets, and philosophers trying to unite these two streams and celebrate in the world and in their own persons the sacred marriage of Logos and Sophia, Word and Wisdom.

This book, an impressionistic history of the Western spiritual tradition, follows the traces from ancient Greece into modern times of those who sought to know the world and themselves, while realizing that they must overcome themselves to love the world and each other.

There are chapters on Pythagoras, Sophia, Celtic Christianity, the Troubadours, the Grail, the Rose Cross, Renaissance spirituality, Romanticism, nineteenth-century occultism, and twentieth-century esotericism. Inspirational interludes place the whole within an atmosphere of Christian mysticism. Tracking this endless trace of our evolving relationship with each other, God, and nature, we begin to understand how human consciousness has changed and evolved and what humanity's task is now.

About the Author
Christopher Bamford is the editor-in-chief of SteinerBooks and Lindisfarne Books. He is the author, translator and editor of numerous books, including Celtic Christianity: Ecology and Holiness, Homage to Pythagoras: Rediscovering Sacred Science and The Noble Traveller. His work was included in the HarperSanFrancisco anthology Best Spiritual Writing 2000.

Publishers Weekly

In a collection of essays, Bamford, director of Lindisfarne Books, explores Sophia, or divine feminine wisdom, as expressed throughout the hermetic or esoteric tradition in Christianity, and in the profound insights of many great Western thinkers and poetsand potentially in each of us as we learn to act like Wisdom herself, opening to receive what God gives. Bamford embraces a difficult subject with personal passion, rendering it with a poetry and incision that sincere readers will find deeply inspiring. Bamford describes the way feminine wisdom acts as the companion and helper to Goda kind of omnipresent cloud or mist that mirrors God's creation. Creation, we learn, took place as a great sigh of compassion, as Sophia helped God become known by becoming incarnate in all that exists. "Sophia's other name, revealed since the Mystery of Golgotha, is primordial cosmic human nature itself," writes Bamford. Christianity is founded upon the belief that Christ is not a teacher or a teaching, but an act of divine creation that reprises the original creation. Through Christ, God enters creation again and again; if only our hearts could awaken to see how "the sacred is in the commonplace and the ordinary is the potentially divine." Bamford proceeds to give a thrilling glimpse of what it might mean to awaken to our original, pure nature, to become wise and to know the world and ourselves through the Incarnation. Ranging through Western tradition, from the ancient Hermetic tradition to the medieval troubadours to the Romantics, Bamford offers a jewel box full of gems about what it can mean to be compassionate and open-hearted, to be Sophia. (Sept.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.