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.

Christianity and Reincarnation, or Here We Go Again

“As they were coming down the mountain, Jesus instructed them, ‘Don’t tell anyone what you have seen, until the Son of Man has been raised from the dead.’ The disciples asked him, ‘Why then do the teachers of the law say that Elijah must come first?’

“Jesus replied, ‘To be sure, Elijah comes and will restore all things. But I tell you, Elijah has already come, and they did not recognize him, but have done to him everything they wished. In the same way the Son of Man is going to suffer at their hands.’ Then the disciples understood that he was talking to them about John the Baptist.” (Matt 17:9–13)

In his stunning work Meditations on the Tarot, Valentin Tomberg, as fervent (if idiosyncratic) a Catholic as you could find, nevertheless holds to the doctrine of reincarnation. It’s not exactly the thesis of his text, but it is a thread that runs throughout it. For Tomberg, reincarnation is not something one needs to prove; it’s simply a fact. As he writes,

“Reincarnation is in no way a theory which one has to believe or not believe. In Hermeticism no one would dream of putting forward a case in order to persuade, or even to dissuade, people of the truth of the ‘eincarnationist theory’. For the Hermeticist it is a fact which is either known through experience or ignored. Just as one does not make propaganda for or against the fact that we sleep at night and wake up anew each morning —for this is a matter of experience —so is the fact that we die and are born anew a matter of experience, i.e. either one has certainty about it or else one does not. But those who arc certain should know that ignorance of reincarnation often has very profound and even sublime reasons associated with the vocation of the person in question. When, for example, a person has a vocation which demands a maximum of concentration in the present, he may renounce all spiritual memories of the past. Because the awakened memory is not always beneficial; it is often a burden. It is so, above all. when it is a matter of a vocation which demands an attitude entirely free of all prejudice, as is the case with the vocations of priest, doctor and judge. The priest, doctor and judge have to concentrate themselves in such a way on the tasks of the present that they must not be distracted by memories of former existences.”1

To this he adds:

“For reincarnation is neither a dogma, i.e. a truth necessary for salvation, nor a heresy, i.e. contrary to a truth necessary for salvation. It is simply a fact of experience, just as sleep and heredity are. As such, it is neutral. Everything depends on its interpretation. One can interpret it in such a manner as to make it a hymn to the glory of God—and one can interpret it in such a way as to make it a blasphemy.”

Of course, some might take issue with this.

Rudolf Steiner, another devoted but idiosyncratic Christian, also held to reincarnation, and Tomberg, deeply influenced by Steiner, no doubt found validation for his own intuitions in the work of the Austrian philosopher.

Some people suspect that, because I have written positively about both Steiner and Tomberg, that I, like they, am a believer in reincarnation. It’s not so simple as that.

Now, I have no qualms about believing that Tibetan Buddhist lamas are able to predict who will be their parents in their next lifetime. The reports of such occurrences, like this one, are far too common to dismiss so easily. Furthermore, having studied it over many years and having taught it in college courses, I can confidently say that The Tibetan Book of the Dead may be the best book on Purgatory ever written. Plato also believed in the return of souls after death. And he wasn’t exactly a dummy.

My problem with reincarnation, in fact, is mostly due to the simplistic or egotistical ways I’ve seen people—among some esotericists, Anthroposophists, Theosophists, and American practitioners of Buddhism, in particular—propose their notions of reincarnation (comparable to the droves of bush league Deconstructionists who followed in the wake of Jacques Derrida’s more subtle employment of Deconstruction). Rudolf Steiner also encountered the type. When after a lecture a woman approached him and told him that she was the reincarnation of Mary Magdalen, Steiner is reported to have replied, “Congratulations! You’re the twenty-fifth Mary Magdalen I’ve met this lifetime!”

Many postmodern reincarnationists, it seems to me, have a spiritually lazy approach to dealing with, as we call it, “their shit.” They attribute interpersonal strife as “due to karma” and then move on. But this kind of moving on is not exactly moving on. More like running away. The main thing it avoids is forgiveness. People don't like to forgive.

Understanding the Church’s hostility to the notion of reincarnation, Tomberg explains why its popularization could be problematic:

“It is the faith that you, dear Unknown Friend, understand the weight of responsibility that weighs on each person who sees himself treating reincarnation nor as belonging to the domain of esoteric (i.e. intimate) experience, but as an exoteric teaching to popularise—called to convince everyone—which has determined me to speak of the practical abuse of the fact of reincarnation. I implore you therefore, dear Unknown Friend, to have the good will to examine, in the light of moral conscience, the question whether the way of treating reincarnation in exoteric teaching that has been adopted and is practised in general both by representatives of the French occult movement of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and by Theosophists. Anthroposophists. Rosicrucians, etc., is justified and desirable.”2

Though some suggest the Bible doesn’t teach reincarnation, I don’t think it’s as simple as that. First of all, the kabbalah, a Jewish mystical teaching born of deep contemplation of scripture, proposes a doctrine of sod ha-gilgul, “the revolution of souls.”3 And it is easy to interpret, as many have, Jesus’s words following the Transfiguration quoted above as evidence for reincarnation.

For my part, I could best be described as a reincarnation conscientious objector or reincarnation agnostic. I certainly think it is possible, and probably true, but I don’t sit around thinking about what my past lives must have been or how they may have contributed to my path through life. There is simply too much important to attend to right now.

A clip from Sean Walsh's film Bloom, based on James Joyce's Ulysses, a book structured on the motif of metempsychosis.

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 one on The Metaphysical Poets.

1 [Valentin Tomberg], Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey into Christian Hermeticism (Angelico Press, 2019), 92 – 93 (forthcoming).

2 Ibid., 362.

3 Simcah Paull Raphael, Jewish Views of the Afterlife, 3rd ed. (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019), chapter 8, “The Afterlife Journey of the Soul in Kabbalah.”