By identifying this grammar, he hoped to find a way to distinguish works of gnosticism from other types with superficial resemblances, such as writings in Neoplatonism.
The next volume, the third in the series, will focus on German Idealism (chiefly, G. W. F. Hegel, F. W. J. Schelling, and Johann Gottlieb Fichte), with a later, fourth volume covering German and English Romanticism (chiefly, William Blake, Johann Christian Friedrich Hölderlin and Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg (Novalis).
In advocating for new ways of recognizing gnosticism, O'Regan draws on categories such as metalepsis that he developed in his earlier work, The Heterodox Hegel.
O'Regan strives at "showing how Boehme's discourse is Valentinian"[5]: 213 and "Philadelphian Society and William Law in England, Pietism in Germany, Louis Claude de St. Martin in France, and Swedenborg in Sweden, and the theosophy societies of the twentieth century" had "repeat Boehme's discourse in a very determinate way"[5]: 214 O'Regan states that "The redemptive activity of Christ in Luther obviously presupposes a fallen humanity, which in turn points back to creatureliness and createdness.
"[5]: 268 O'Regan in Gnostic Apocalypse asserts his "conversation with not only with David Walsh and the Voegelin school of interpretation, but also with the radically different kind of genealogy of Michel Foucault".
Even if we listen seriously to Boehme’s commentators, hear what genealogists such as Baur, Staudenmaier, and Walsh have to say, and recall what Hegel said about the importance of a speculative thinker who with Bacon and Descartes contributes to the formation of specifically modern philosophical discourse, deployment of this conceptual apparatus looks like serious overkill.