The Vulnerable and the Powerful

There are lots of ways in which one could describe the cultural metamorphoses of the past year. “The Year of Plague,” for example, or “The Rise of the Archons” (much more accurate than “The Great reset”) would be good choices, though I also find delight in calling it “The Revenge of the Nerd in the Pastel Sweater.” But I think the most accurate description would be to call this “The Time of the Vulnerable and the Powerful.”

That might seem pretty simple and straightforward, but it’s not. Since the beginning of lockdowns and various mandates and restrictions, I have been more concerned about the threats to working people and the working poor than I have been about the threat or spread of illness. Not that I’m not unconcerned about illness. My eighty-four-year-old mother, a vulnerable though scrappy auburn-haired Irishwoman who suffers from dementia, lives with me and I was concerned early on that she might get ill. Thankfully, she hasn’t—not even a cold—but living on a farm, eating organic food, drinking clean water, and being around children with sketchy hand-washing habits all the time seems to have bolstered her immune system. When she was in a nursing home before she moved in with us six years ago, she was ill all the time and in the hospital almost quarterly—the caretakers thought she’d die within months under our “unprofessional care.” It’s more than possible that she would have died, of loneliness if not illness, had she still been in the hands of “the professionals” over the past year. But I have also seen friends and family members profoundly impacted, if not permanently damaged (time will tell), from the psychological ramifications of the past year’s events. This is to say nothing of the countless numbers of people who lost businesses (my favorite music store in a nearby town not the least among them) or livelihoods due to the issue of our times.

I know many people, dedicated people of all faiths among them, who know we have a mandate to protect the vulnerable and the powerless. Psalm 82 is explicit about this mandate, employing the imperative tense:

Defend the poor and fatherless: do justice to the afflicted and needy.

Deliver the poor and needy: rid them out of the hand of the wicked.

They know not, neither will they understand; they walk on in darkness:

all the foundations of the earth are out of course. (3-5)

All the foundations of the earth are out of course.

What bothers me, though, is how this desire to protect the vulnerable has resulted in the surrender of the wills and intellects of so many to the dictates of governments, NGOs, and other professional international bodies and authorities. The result is that many who profess a concern for the vulnerable now look as though their real allegiance is with the powerful. And don’t think the powerful haven’t noticed. We all know about the great transfer of wealth (bottom to top) that occurred over the past year. But people seem to be okay with that in order to have the illusion of safety. They might grouse, of course, do a little social media posturing, but nobody seems to care enough to act against, or at least to resist, the ever-increasing power and insatiable appetites of the archons.

So I guess my problem is that I don’t see how giving the powerful more power protects the vulnerable. Shouldn’t the vulnerable be the ones gaining more agency and power? They’re not. And now even those in the middle—not the most vulnerable (though still vulnerable) but lacking in any kind of power—are likewise under threat from the powerful.

For these and other reasons, I prefer a kind of Christian anarchism, similar, but not identical, to that of my Amish neighbors (I write about this in my book Transfiguration) that while it doesn’t completely destroy the concept of power at least dilutes it by distribution—a very communitarian/distributist ethos. We don’t have that. Still, as I have been arguing for a long time, we can inculcate such a sensibility at the micro-level. That is, not by trying to change “The System,” but by changing ourselves and our relationships to the worlds around us.

Power is a tool of Satan (it was what he used to tempt the Master), though people, as they mobilize and think in groups, tend to like the idea of a strong authority. It gives them a feeling of security (how often that word comes up as of late!) The ancient Israelites, looking around the cultures of the Levant, saw that their neighbors had strong kings, and, in their mimetic desire, the Israelites wanted one, too. After their begging and pleading (or, better, whining) Yahweh gave them enough rope to hang themselves, but not without a warning:

“These will be the ways of the king who will reign over you: he will take your sons and appoint them to his chariots and to be his horsemen, and to run before his chariots; and he will appoint for himself commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and some to plow his ground and to reap his harvest, and to make his implements of war and the equipment of his chariots. He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive orchards and give them to his courtiers. He will take one-tenth of your grain and of your vineyards and give it to his officers and his courtiers. He will take your male and female slaves, and the best of your cattle and donkeys, and put them to his work. He will take one-tenth of your flocks, and you shall be his slaves. And in that day you will cry out because of your king, whom you have chosen for yourselves; but the Lord will not answer you in that day.” (1 Samuel 8:11-18)

They hung themselves, and we are pretty much following suit. This is also why I think those Catholic traddies out there styling themselves “monarchists” (particularly those in the New World) are completely full of you-know-what and cling to their bogus idea of “Christendom” out of an impoverished notion of what it means to be a Christian. Jesus didn’t come as a king. His kingdom is not of this world (and by “this world,” please don’t make the mistake of thinking he meant the created world—he was talking about the realm of Satan and those in league with him to gain control over the vulnerable and everything else. I’m sure you can find fitting examples in your social media feed). People have often asked me over this past strange year what we should do. In fact, I hear from people on this topic almost daily. To quote J.C. Crawford’s legendary introduction to the MC5 on their classic album Kick out the Jams (I am from Detroit, after all), “The time has come for each and every one of you to decide, whether you are gonna be the problem, or whether you are gonna be the solution.” You must choose, brothers and sisters, you must choose.

But I don’t think this is a political problem at all (politics, actually is the problem). As my beloved Simone Weil observed, “It is not religion but revolution that is the opium of the people.” Ours is a spiritual problem, and a pressing one at that. This kind can only be cast out by prayer.

It is in this register that I believe the invocation of St. Michael the Archangel, called by Valentin Tomberg “the Archistrategist,” is more than appropriate at our moment. The Celtic tradition relied upon the intercession of the archangel, as in these lines from the Welsh “Litany of Creation”:

I beseech you by the tenth order on the compact earth. I beseech praiseworthy Michael to help me against demons.

Together with Michael, I beseech you by land and by sea unceasingly; I beseech you respectfully by every quality of God the Father.

I beseech you, O Lord, by the suffering of your body, white with fasting; I beseech you by the contemplative life, I beseech you by the active life.

I beseech the people of heaven, with Michael, for my soul; I beseech the saints of the world to help me on earth.

I beseech the people of heaven with bright-armed Michael; I beseech you by the triad of wind, sun, and moon.

Note the yoking of the contemplative and active lives.

Another useful prayer is the Byzantine Akathist to Michael the Archangel. We prayed this prior to one Michaelmas festival in our barn a couple years ago. It is intense. Here’s a passage:

“Standing before the Throne of God, O Archangel Michael, you are entirely in the heights and yet you are not far from men and women below on the earth. You ever fight against the enemies of mankind’s salvation. It is fitting, for all who wish to reach the long-desired homeland of Heaven, to call on you with one accord:

“Hail, leader of the thrice-holy hymn of the angels.

Hail, ever-ready advocate and guardian of those on earth.

Hail, mighty defender of those who speak truth and live by mercy.

Hail, for in a strange manner, you struck down Pharaoh with his faithless Egyptians in their ponderous pride.

Hail, for you gloriously led the Jews in their wandering through the wilderness.

Hail, for you quenched the flame of the fiery furnace of Babylon for the three youths.

Hail, Michael, Supreme Commander with all the hosts of Heaven.”

There are other prayers, of course. Besides Psalm 82, there are also St. Patrick’s Breastplate and, obviously, the secret weapon of the rosary—and many others. If you want to align yourself with power, this is the place to look, not to archons growing fat and rich on your fear.

Fear, to speak plainly, is a luxury of the faithless and if unchecked it only spreads like a cancer. As you can no doubt see, it has metastasized all over the planet. But this is not a luxury the Christian can afford. We cannot avoid that messengers of Satan will torment us, with fear as much as disease; it is part of the human condition this side of the Parousia. Saint Paul found this out through experience, not theory:

“...I was given a thorn in my flesh, a messenger of Satan, to torment me. Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me. But he said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’ Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong.” (2 Corinthians 12:7-10)

We are all vulnerable, praise God. So take up your armor of light.

Michael’s latest books are an edition of The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz and 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. Also check out the latest volume of Jesus the Imagination: The Garden.

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.

“May the holiness of Thy name shine anew in our remembering”: Sophia in Exile

We all have books that have changed us or the way we think about the world, about ourselves. My own list would include William Blake’s Jerusalem, Kathleen Raine’s Defending Ancient Springs, Rudolf Steiner’s lectures on beekeeping and agriculture, the work of Goethe, and the poetry of William Butler Yeats, Czeslaw Milosz, and Guillaume Apollinaire, among many others.

One book that significantly changed the way I think in recent years is Margaret Barker’s The Mother of the Lord, Volume I: The Lady in the Temple. In the book Barker argues that the religious reforms of King Josiah (7th c. BC—you can find him in the Bible in 2 Kings) were centered on expelling the worship of Hokmah (Wisdom/Sophia) from Hebrew temple worship. That is, she argues that, prior to Josiah, Wisdom as the consort of Yaweh was venerated (dare we say it?) as a goddess. To be fair, Barker does not make an absolutely airtight case in the book, but then it would be nearly impossible to do so. The winners write history, after all, and Josiah was obviously the winner. There is very little in the way of a paper (or parchment) trail. Nevertheless, she does some impressive scholarly detective work and makes some very intriguing assertions. One fascinating point is that the Jewish communities in North Africa of the period (in and around Alexandria) were in fact exiles/refugees fleeing Josiah’s purge of Hokmah in order that they might preserve her worship in relative freedom. Take into account that the Wisdom Books, particularly Wisdom and Sirach which celebrate Sophia’s participation with Yaweh in not only Creation but in Jewish history, were written by Alexandrian Jews and Barker’s thesis gets all the more tantalizing. I have not been able to shake Barker’s insights.

Reading Barker made me rethink my position on Valentianian Gnosticism. It now seems to me that the Gnostic mythos of Sophia and her exile at least echoes the exile of Sophia from official Hebrew religion. When read in this light, things seem very different from the almost knee-jerk rejection of Gnosticism one finds among mainstream theologians going back to the Fathers. Maybe we need to rethink this one.

With this in mind, I found myself needing to rethink Valentin Tomberg’s Our Mother prayer:

Our Mother, Thou who art in the darkness of the underworld,

May the holiness of Thy name shine anew in our remembering,

May the breath of Thy awakening kingdom warm the hearts of all who wander homeless,

May the resurrection of Thy will renew eternal faith even unto the depths of physical substance.

Receive this day the living memory of Thee from human hearts,

Who implore thee to forgive the sin of forgetting Thee,

And are ready to fight against temptation, which has led Thee to existence in darkness,

That through the Deed of the Son,

The immeasurable pain of the Father be stilled,

By the liberation of all beings from the tragedy of Thy withdrawal.

For Thine is the homeland and the boundless wisdom and the ail-merciful grace, for all and everything in the Circle of All. Amen.

Tomberg, who wrote another book, Meditations on the Tarot, that made me rethink the world and myself (not to mention rethink Catholicism), wrote this prayer around the time of his conversion to Catholicism (though it does not appear in any of his Catholic works). As I write in The Submerged Reality: Sophiology and the Turn to a Poetic Metaphysics, I attributed what one might call the “Gnostic overtones” of this prayer to the influence of Rudolf Steiner (Tomberg had been an Anthroposophist prior to his conversion). Steiner offers a similar verse:

Isis-Sophia

Wisdom of God

Lucifer has slain her,

And on wings of cosmic forces

Carried her away into the depths of space.

Christ-Will

Working in us

Shall tear her from Lucifer

And on grounds of spiritual knowledge

Call to new life in human souls

Isis-Sophia

Wisdom of God.

Having read Barker’s intervention, now I’m not so sure these prayers are as tinged with Gnosticism as we have been trained to understand it.

My take is that Tomberg and Steiner intuited the condition of Sophia in the world, an intuition that jibes with some aspects of Gnosticism and with Margaret Barker’s scholarly excavation. They were certainly not the first. As I have argued throughout my work, many others have arrived at similar insights regarding Sophia’s seeming captivity in darkness, Jacob Boehme, John Pordage and Jane Lead, Vladimir Solovyov, Pavel Florensky, Sergius Bulgakov, and Thomas Merton among them.

As I’ve written before, it’s not really Sophia who strains in captivity. We do. But it surely seems as if she is imprisoned, when it’s really we who are. Such a reciprocity! And the only way to awaken her (us) is through contemplation, intentionality, presence. As Goethe wrote, the Eternal Feminine, indeed, draws us ever onward.

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.