“[F]or a variety of reasons, we live in an age of extreme hermeneutical pessimism. We despair of the possibility of reaching the ‘true interpretation’ of even the simplest of texts. In such an environment, the idea that earlier thinkers wrote esoterically is a most unwelcome suggestion, threatening to burden the practice of scholarship with all kinds of new and intractable demands. Exactly how is one to read ‘between the lines,’ and how is one ever to know that one has reached the author’s true, esoteric teaching? Every such difficulty, real as it may be, grows in our eyes into a sheer impossibility. In our hermeneutical malaise, this theory feels to us altogether unmanageable, unbearable, unacceptable.” (Arthur Melzer, Philosophy Between the Lines: The Lost History of Esoteric Writing, pages 106-07.)