The Irreducible Gap: The Paradox of Valentin Tomberg

Valentin Tomberg in the 1930s

Recently, I found myself getting pretty excited about the impending publication of Angelico Press’s edition of Valentin Tomberg’s magnum opus, known in English as Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey into Christian Mysticism. My excitement started when I was allowed a sneak peak and opportunity to copyedit some of the paratexts for the edition. The paratexts—by Ernst von Hippel, Robert Spaemann, and Hans Urs von Balthasar—are practically worth the price of the book. Tomberg’s book, which has inspired many—but which has also undoubtedly concerned many—may be the most radically orthodox (yo, Milbank!) work of the last century.

Part of the wonder embodied in Meditations is how it balances a subtle (if highly idiosyncratic) traditionalism with some theologically daring proposition concerning astrology, reincarnation, and, most central to its message (if subsumed to some degree), sophiology. Spaemann attempts an explanation:

“What lies closest to the author’s heart, however, is opening a path for all seekers after Wisdom, all Hermeticists, Theosophists, and Anthroposophists, to the one Church—that of the apostles, of God-become-Man—as their true spiritual living-space, as the spiritual homeland from which, whether they will or no, they must daily draw life, and without whose prayers and sacraments the realities to which these latter correspond must surely disappear entirely from our world. His gratitude for this God-given spiritual living-space is most stirring in its warmth and depth. From the Catholic Church he does not expect a corresponding gratitude toward Hermetic wisdom-seekers and initiates, but only that it might clear out a humble corner for any who, in accord with their vocation, can do no other than walk the path of analogy and correspondence on the track of the mysteries—both great and small—of Reality, from time to time making most remarkable discoveries.”1

There can be little doubt that Tomberg’s book has done precisely this. I have encountered an extraordinary array of people from all walks of life, from all over the world, who entered or returned to the Catholic Church following their own encounters with Meditations, not least of whom is Robert Powell, the man responsible for translating the book into English. As he once told me, through the act of translating the manuscript, he felt called to enter the Catholic Mystery.

Tomberg’s non-traditional traditionalism (to turn a phrase) resides in his devotion to the dogmas of the Church, his upholding of the papal office, and his veneration for the saints, doctors, and teachers of Catholicism (he’s particularly fond of John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila, Bonaventure, and Bernard of Clairvaux, among others)—while at the same time expressing his admiration for certain figures from the French Occult Revival of the nineteenth century (for example, Joséphin Péladan, Eliphas Levi, Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin, and so forth). His traditionalism, in fact, goes so far as to question Vatican II (Tomberg died in 1973). In his last book (Covenant of the Heart, also known as Lazarus, Come Forth!) he voices his skepticism about the aims of the Council:

“The combination of an unyielding, unshakable solidity of faith with the patience that can wait hundreds of years makes the ‘rock’ of the See of Peter unconquerable in the confrontation with the streams of time, which are all, indeed, merely temporal winds and waves. For the ‘demands and needs’ of the time are necessarily temporary. Also temporal, therefore, are efforts towards ‘democritization’ of the Church, de-dogmatization of Church teaching through psychological interpretations, and similar endeavors to ‘modernize’ the Church, her teaching, and her rules. They offend against the commandment: ‘Honor your father and your mother’.”2

Needless to say, a good many of Tomberg’s more zealous readers take up this thread—no doubt seasoned by a good dose of the anti-V2 hysteria that afflicts our times—and join in the chorus of Vatican II derision, if not flirting with Sede Vacantism or other varieties of alt-right Catholic bizarreness. But displeasure with Vatican II is not all there is to Valentin Tomberg.

More importantly, Tomberg was also a religious innovator who held a deep admiration for Teilhard de Chardin (which I’m sure feels awkward for the Traddies), Henri Bergson, and C. G. Jung. He also understood reincarnation as a metaphysical reality and recognized the influence of the stars on human life. And much more importantly (in my opinion), Tomberg was one of the first to articulate a Catholic Sophiology (I explore this in The Submerged Reality). But I don’t mean a “Catholic Sophiology” as intellectual construct: I mean a Catholic Sophiology as extension of the Tradition. In addition to other ways, he did this through his “Our Mother” prayer, as well as through his introduction of the Luminous Holy Trinity: The Mother, the Daughter, and the Holy Soul (I've written about these here and here). So maybe he wasn’t as traditional as all that. Tomberg’s a paradox.

What Tomberg does, I think, is explode complacent notions of what it means to be “Catholic.” Ironically, the Tombergian Traddies often follow him here initially before trying to pass as the Catholic conservatives of their pre-V2 imaginations. He’s much more important than that. Tomberg, that is, cuts to the core of the Christian Mystery. As Slovoj Žižek explains it, “Christianity is the miraculous Event that disturbs the balance of the One-All; it is the violent intrusion of Difference that precisely throws the balanced circuit of the universe off the rails.”3 If Valentin Tomberg doesn’t disturb the balance of the One-All, nobody does.

It may be that even Tomberg didn’t see the power in what he was proposing. Sophiology, in the context of contemporary Christianity, carries with it a complete paradigm shift. No one likes to change, let alone shift paradigms, but that is clearly what confronts us in the work of Tomberg. Again to quote Žižek :

“...it is possible today to redeem this core of Christianity only in the gesture of abandoning the shell of its institutional organization (and, even more so, of its specific religious experience). The gap is irreducible: either one drops the religious form, or one maintains the form, but loses the essence. That is the ultimate heroic gesture that awaits Christianity: in order to save its treasure, it has to sacrifice itself—like Christ, who had to die so that Christianity could emerge.”4

Michael's latest book is Transfiguration: Notes toward a Radical Catholic Reimagination of Everything. He can be reached at director@thecenterforsophiologicalstudies.com See also The Center for Sophiological Studies' available courses, including courses on Sophiology and Valentin Tomberg’s Meditations on the Tarot.

1 Robert Spaemann, “Introduction to Second German Edition,” Meditations on the Tarot, trans. Robert Powell (Angelico Press, 2019), v.

2 Valentin Tomberg, Covenant of the Heart: Meditations of a Christian Hermeticist on the Mysteries of Tradition, trans. Robert Powell and James Morgante (Element, 1992), 197.

3 Slavoj Žižek, The Fragile Absolute: Or Why the Christian Legacy Is Worth Fighting for (Verso, 2000), 112.

4 Slavoj Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity (The MIT Press, 2003), 171.

In the Name of the Mother, and of the Daughter, and of the Holy Soul

The Swiss psychoanalyst C.G. Jung was notably enthusiastic in 1950 when Pope Pius XII promulgated the dogma of the Assumptio Mariae. Indeed, he saw this event as a psychological necessity for Western culture:

For a long time there had been a psychological need for this, as is evident in the medieval pictures of the Assumption and Coronation of the Virgin; it was also responsible for elevating her to a position as Mediatrix, corresponding to Christ’s position as mediator…. The recent promulgation of the dogma of the Assumption emphasizes the taking up not only of the soul but of the body of Mary into the Trinity.[1]

For Jung, this event corresponded to the integration of male and female (animus and anima) as the goal of psychology. He called this “a higher union…. an indispensable prerequisite for wholeness”[2] and his long fascination with alchemy certainly bears witness to this insight. Of this union—which is a true communion—he writes,

They therefore represent a supreme pair of opposites, not hopelessly divided by logical contradiction but, because of the mutual attraction between them, giving promise of union and actually making it possible. The coniunctio oppositorum engaged the speculations of the alchemists in the form of the “Chymical Wedding,” and those of the cabalists in the form of Tifereth and Malchuth or God and the Shekinah, not to speak of the marriage of the Lamb.[3]

Any child raised as a Christian, I suspect, at one time or another asks why the Trinity lacks a feminine face. Of course, theologians are often quick to say that God does not really have a gender. Whatever. Any child can see something is out of whack in this imaginary. But they are taught to not ask ostensibly heretical questions.

With revelations of the pervasive pederasty in Catholic seminary culture (though I suspect other denominations are not exempt), one can see how the absence of the psychic integration of the feminine leads to pathology: a tradition going back at least to Classical Greece. Talk about the union of Athens and Jerusalem! Such an environment is by definition sterile.

Postmodernity may think it has outgrown the masculine Christian imaginary, but this is hardly the case. This imaginary clearly infects postmodernity as such. All too often, even feminism counts acting like the men (while simultaneously declaring gender as socially constructed) a victory. I don’t see how the last century has made the world a more hospitable place for the feminine. If anything, it is even more hostile to the feminine. As Paul Evdokimov has written, “The modern, profoundly masculine world, where the feminine charism plays no role whatsoever, is more and more a world without God, for it has no mother and God cannot be born in it.”[4] I see little evidence of a feminine charism, either in seminary culture or in society at large. In fact, I think we’ve had it wrong from the beginning. Scripture scholar and Methodist minister Margaret Barker suggests precisely this.

In her illuminating book The Mother of the Lord: Volume I: The Lady in the Temple (Bloomsbury, 2012), Barker argues that the originary form of Jewish worship included reverence for Wisdom before she was expelled from the Temple and all but expunged from scripture following the reforms of Josiah.[5] She then traces the migration of the veneration of Wisdom from the hostile environment of Josiah-era Jerusalem to Alexandria where a Jewish community preserved her worship. (Alexandria is also where the deuterocanonical books of Wisdom and Sirach were composed.) Wisdom spirituality, according to Barker, was characterized more by attentiveness to creation than to history and law. Furthermore, Wisdom was the bearer of God’s glory:

Now if the Lady in Jerusalem was Wisdom…and also the glory… ‘the whole earth full of his glory’ or ‘the knowledge of the glory’ indicates the manner of her divine presence on earth: the Lady was present in her knowledge of the creation. This too was remembered by those in Egypt who had not abandoned the Lady.[6]

One would think that Barker’s scholarly excavation might be affirming the simple intuition of a child who realizes that, if there is a Father, there needs to be a Mother. That our culture no longer makes this assumption, then, could be traced back to what Barker takes (as I do) to be a tragic and fatal mistake of religious politics.

Among those whose intuition led them to infer the invisible presence of the Mother are the Eastern Orthodox archbishop (and convert from Catholicism) Alexis van der Mensbrugghe (1899–1980) and contemporary Byzantine Catholic priest and theologian István Cselényi, both of whom question whether it is Wisdom to whom God speaks in Genesis: “Let us create man in our image, after our likeness…. in the divine image he created him; male and female he created them” (1:26, 27). The Divine Image: male and female.

Another person who came to this insight was the Catholic mystic and hermeticist Valentin Tomberg. In his astounding Meditations on the Tarot, Tomberg makes the case for what he calls “the Luminous Holy Trinity.” His is a daring conclusion:

For just as no one comes to the Father but by Jesus Christ (John xiv, 6), so does no one understand the Holy Trinity but by Mary-Sophia. And just as the Holy Trinity manifests itself through Jesus Christ, so understanding of this manifestation is possible only through intuitive apprehension of what the virgin mother of Jesus Christ understands of it, who not only bore him and brought him to the light of day, but who also was present—present as mother—at his death on the Cross. And just as Wisdom (Sophia)—as Solomon said—was present at the creation (“when he established the heavens, I was there, when he drew a circle on the face of the deep. . .then I was at work beside him”—Proverbs viii, 27-31) and “built her house. . .set up her seven pillars” (Proverbs ix, 1), so Mary-Sophia was present at the redemption and "was at work beside him", and “built her house . . . set up her seven pillars”, i.e. she became Our Lady of the seven sorrows. For the seven sorrows of Mary correspond, for the work of the redemption, to the seven pillars of Sophia for the work of creation. Sophia is the queen of the “three luminaries”—the moon, the sun and the stars—as the “great portent” of the Apocalypse shows. And just as the word of the Holy Trinity became flesh in Jesus Christ, so did the light of the Holy Trinity become flesh in Mary-Sophia—the light, i.e. threefold receptivity, the threefold faculty of intelligent reaction, or understanding. Mary’s words: mihi fiat secundum verbum tuum (“let it be to me according to your word”—Luke i, 38) are the key to the mystery of the relationship between the pure act and pure reaction, between the word and understanding—lastly, between Father, Son and Holy Spirit on the one hand and Mother, Daughter and Holy Soul on the other hand. They are the true key to the “seal of Solomon”—the hexagram.

The hexagram is not at all the symbol of good and evil, but rather is that of the threefold pure act or “fire” and the threefold pure reaction (the threefold mihi fiat secundum verbum tuum) or “light of fire”, i.e. “water”. “Fire” and “water” signify that which acts spontaneously and creatively on the one hand, and that which reacts reflectively on the other hand — the latter being the conscious “yes” or light of mihi fiat secundum verbum tuum. This is the elementary meaning of the “seal of Solomon”—elementary in the sense of the elements “fire” and “water”, taken on their highest level.

But the still higher meaning that this symbol hides—or rather reveals—is that of the luminous Holy Trinity, i.e. that of understanding of the Holy Trinity.

Then it is the hexagram comprising the two triangles: Father-Son-Holy Spirit; Mother-Daughter-Holy Soul (see figure). And these two triangles of the luminous Holy Trinity are revealed in the work of redemption accomplished through Jesus Christ and conceived through Mary-Sophia. Jesus Christ is its agent; Mary-Sophia is its luminous reaction. The two triangles reveal the luminous Holy Trinity in the work of creation accomplished by the creative Word and animated by the “yes” of Wisdom-Sophia. The luminous Holy Trinity is therefore the unity of the triune Creator and the triune natura naturans, i.e. the unity of the threefold Fiat and the threefold mihi fiat secundum verbum tuum which reveals itself in natura naturata, in the world created before the Fall; and it is the triune divine spirit and the triune soul of the world manifesting in the body of the world—in natura naturata.[7]

Have we been suffering from an incomplete picture all this time? I believe we have. And, whether one considers oneself a Christian, or as religious in any way or not, we are all suffering from this lack of integration. And it cannot be attained by mechanical means. For our struggle is not with flesh and blood.

[1] C.G. Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis: An Inquiry into the Separation and Synthesis of Psychic Opposites in Alchemy, 2nd ed., trans. R.F.C. Hull, Bollingen Series XX (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), 186.

[2] C.G. Jung, Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, trans. R.F.C. Hull, 2nd ed., Bollingen Series XX (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959), 32.

[3] C.G. Jung, Aion, 268.

[4] Paul Evdokimov, Woman and he Salvation of the World: A Christian Anthropology on the Charisms of Women, trans. Anthony P. Gythiel (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1994), 251.

[5] Much of Barker’s work focuses on this aspect of the First Temple.

[6] The Mother of the Lord, Volume I: The Lady in the Temple, 259.

[7] Meditations on the Tarot, trans. Robert Powell (Angelico Press, 2019), 547–48.

Michael can be reached at director@thecenterforsophiologicalstudies.com See also The Center for Sophiological Studies' available courses.