Much ink (virtual and real) has been spilled regarding the conversion of Valentin Tomberg from Anthroposophy to Roman Catholicism. Yet, as we saw in the conversion of Rene Guenon, such a move cannot be understood in the conventional sense as the rejection of one thing and the adoption of another.
Nevertheless, there are those who are convinced that Tomberg rejected so-called New Age teachings to become a Catholic, and therefore attempt to follow him in that path. As a matter of fact, it seems that the Internet is replete with converts (or reverts) who are quite enthusiastic in promoting their new-found faith, usually to excess. While we think such conversions are a good thing in general, that is not at all Tomberg’s message.
In Letter XI, Tomberg explain his reasons for entering the Church.
The way of Hermeticism, solitary and intimate as it is, comprises authentic experiences from which it follows that the Roman Catholic Church is, in fact, a depository of Christian spiritual truth, and the more one advances on the way of free research for this truth, the more one approaches the Church. Sooner or later one inevitably experiences that spiritual reality corresponds — with an astonishing exactitude —to what the Church teaches.
He then lists several specific teachings:
- There are guardian angels
- There are saints who participate actively in our lives
- The Blessed Virgin is real, as she is understood, worshiped, and portrayed
- The sacraments are effective and there are seven of them
- The three sacred vows of obedience, chastity, and poverty constitute the very essence of all authentic spirituality
- Prayer is a powerful means of charity
- The ecclesiastical hierarchy reflects the celestial hierarchical order
- The Holy See and the papacy represent a mystery of divine magic
- Hell, purgatory, and heaven are realities
- The Master himself abides with his Church
- The Master is always findable and meetable there
The Common Believer
Any cursory reading of the Meditations shows that it is replete with references to ideas, systems, books, and people that are certainly precursors to the New Age teachings of today. Yet Tomberg did not reject them in toto, not at all. To the contrary, he makes the remarkable claim that following Hermetic teaching to its depths led to his “conversion”. The reasons for this must be explored in what follows. But first of all, note that Tomberg does not claim any sort of superiority; rather, he acknowledges a solidarity with common believers, as expressed in Letter IV.
For the Hermetic-philosophical sense has more in common with the plain and sincere faith of simple people than abstract metaphysics has.
- For the common believer, God lives; likewise for the Hermeticist.
- The believer addresses himself to saints and Angels; for the Hermeticist they are real.
- The believer believes in miracles; the Hermeticist lives in the presence of miracles.
- The believer prays for the living and the dead; the Hermeticist dedicates all his efforts in the domain of sacred magic to the good of the living and the dead.
- The believer esteems all that which is traditional; the Hermeticist does likewise.
Rejection of Alternatives
In the Introduction to Inner Development, we are informed that Tomberg initially tried to align himself with the Christian Community and then with Russian Orthodoxy.
The Christian Community was formed by some of Rudolf Steiner’s followers; they have no dogmas, although they have priests and seven sacraments. However, dogmas are not an affront to free will as the Community claims, but rather they are living symbols of a higher spiritual reality as Tomberg came to realize. Typically, organisations that reject dogmas tend to converge to liberalism.
Tomberg attempted to work with the Christian Community by introducing a cult of Mary-Sophia. Emil Bock reportedly said to him: “We have Michael, that’s enough! We don’t need Mary-Sophia.”
As we will see in the next section, that is absolutely contrary to Tomberg’s purpose and mission.
Orthodoxy lacks a complete hierarchy, in particular, the papacy which Tomberg regards as a mystery of divine magic. Russian Orthodoxy retains a notion of being the Third Rome, with an Emperor and the Patriarch as Pope. From the esoteric perspective, this is a caricature of the true teaching, whose real source is suspect. Most of the early popes came from the East; they were more aware of the celestial hierarchy and divine magic. Someday, there will be a Russian pope ruling in the first Rome.
The Blessed Virgin
Tomberg insists that the Blessed Virgin is real, as she is understood, worshipped, and portrayed in the Church. This means that he accepts the four Marian dogmas, not as beliefs but as a personal experience. These are:
- Mary as the Mother of God
- Perpetual Virginity
- The Immaculate Conception
- The Assumption
Although it is not so common today, when I was a schoolboy, we would attend yearly novena to the Blessed Virgin. We would be given scapulars or medals. Although I might not have fully understood their significance at the time, I have always lived in the security of Mary’s promises of protection. Tomberg describes the esoteric meaning of these promises:
Every Hermeticist who truly seeks authentic spiritual reality will sooner or later meet the Blessed Virgin. This meeting signifies, apart from the illumination and consolation that it comprises, protection against a very serious spiritual danger. For he who advances in the sense of depth and height in the “domain of the invisible” one day arrives at the sphere known by esotericists as the “sphere of mirages” or the “zone of illusion”. This zone surrounds the earth as a belt of illusory mirages. It is this zone which the prophets and the Apocalypse designate “Babylon”. The soul and the queen of this zone is in fact Babylon, the great prostitute, who is the adversary of the Virgin. … One cannot traverse it without the protection of the “mantle of the Blessed Virgin”.
Mary is celebrated as the Queen of Heaven. Tomberg has a deeper insight that takes that teaching much further. In Letter XI, he asserts:
The day when it is achieved will be the day of a new festival — the festival of the coronation of the Virgin on earth. For then the principle of opposition will be replaced on earth by that of collaboration. This will be the triumph of life over electricity. And cerebral intellectuality will then bow before Wisdom (SOPHIA) and will unite with her.
The Virgin will be not only Queen of Heaven, but also Queen of the Earth. Of course, this is confirmed in the Dogmatic Constitution, which calls Mary the Queen of the Universe.
The triumph of life over electricity refers to the Hermetic teaching of electricity, or electro-magnetism, arising from lower forces. Just as a reminder, Tomberg explains:
The fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil — the fruit of the polarity of opposites — is therefore electricity; and electricity entails fatigue, exhaustion. death. Death is the price that is paid for the knowledge of good and evil, i.e. the price of life amidst opposites. For it is electricity — physical, psychic and mental — which was introduced into the being of Adam-Eve. and thereby into the whole of life-endowed Nature, from the moment that Adam-Eve entered into communion with the tree of opposites, that is to say with the principle of electricity. And it is thus that death entered into the domain of life-endowed Nature.
Therefore, the next dogma will be Mary as Co-Redemptrix.
Way, Truth, and Life
Tomberg rejected Anthroposophy (although not Steiner himself), describing it as
a movement for cultural reform (art, education, medicine, agriculture) deprived of living esotericism, i.e. without mysticism, without gnosis and without magic, which have been replaced by lectures, study and intellectual work aiming at establishing a concordance between the writings and stenographed lectures of the master.
In other words, it has Truth but not the Life. It is locked in concepts, meaning that one learns the concepts first, then tries to have the experience, whereas it should be vice versa. Tomberg explained this in a letter to Bernhard Martin:
First they [i.e., Anthroposophists] have a world of formulated concepts and then try to arrive at experience. But the concepts hold them shut within their world: the spiritual world remains silent, because they are the ones talking about the spiritual world; they don’t let it speak. It’s otherwise with people [like Jung]; in silence they let the spiritual world speak. And the spiritual world speaks in symbols — i.e. in mystery speech—today just like before.
In other words, it is necessary to treat the concepts as symbols, as the symbol is understood in the Meditations. It is an invitation to a personal meditation, not a univocal concept to be learned. In Covenant of the Heart, Tomberg is more explicit:
Alas it happened, however, for reasons which we need not go into here, that Rudolf Steiner gave his work the form of a science, so-called “spiritual science”. Thereby the third aspect of the indivisible threefoldness of the Way, the Truth, and the Life was not given enough attention. For the scientific form into which the logic of the Logos had to be cast, and by which it was limited, left little room for pure mysticism and spiritual magic, that is, for Life. So there is in Anthroposophy a magnificent achievement of thought and will — which is, however, unmystical and unmagical, i.e. in want of Life. Rudolf Steiner himself was conscious of this essential lack. Therefore, it was with a certain amount of hope that he indicated the necessary appearance of a successor (the Bodhisattva), who would remedy this lack and would bring the trinity of the Way, the Truth, and the Life to full fruition.
Knowledge as Intuition
Tomberg is trying to get us out of our heads in order to experience a higher type of knowledge. In Covenant of the Heart, he explains:
truth is based on “intuition [which] is not attained through practical knowledge or intellectual consideration (reflection), but through direct experience of reality … ‘an evolving revelation from the inner being of man’ … and ‘a direct grasping of the being of things’.
He then goes on:
For those who experience it, this form of knowledge counts as the highest because it is experienced … as the result of the most profound contemplation and the greatest concentration, in comparison with which that of intellectual consideration and the practical knowledge gained by way of observation appears superficial. However, it does not count in the slightest way as knowledge (let alone as the highest form of knowledge) for the scientific disciplines which, as such, lay claim to being of general validity. For the scientific approach is not to strive simply for the truth, but rather to strive for that brand of truth which is of general validity, i.e. that which can be comprehended fundamentally by everyone bestowed with healthy understanding and faculties of perception, and which should thus be concurred with. A scientific discipline, whether a spiritual-scientific or a natural-scientific discipline, does not want to, and is not able to, address itself only to those people who are capable of the concentration and inner deepening necessary for intuition. Were it to do so, it would then not be scientific, i.e. generally comprehensible and provable. Rather, it would be “esoteric”, i.e. a matter for an elite group of special people. In this sense theology is also “science” since, assuming the authority of Scripture and the Church are acknowledged, it can be comprehended and tested by all believers.
Direct spiritual knowledge achieved through intuition is personal—never general or universal, i.e. scientific in the conventional sense. That is why Hermetism is not one philosophical system among many systems, nor one scientific theory among other competing views, nor the foundation of a new religion. In other words, it is not expansive in the horizontal sense, but rather a matter of depth, i.e., a deepening of understanding.
Postscript
So, to simplify, we can define:
- The Truth as the understanding of concepts
- The Way as the deepening of that understanding
- The Life as direct intuition
An example might be this:
- Hegel’s system of Absolute Idealism, or perhaps other similar systems
- Steiner created not just a thought system, but also proposed a path of spirit and soul development
- Tomberg opens up the meaning of symbols and intuition
What I have in common with Valentin Tomberg His acceptance of The woman of all nations and her messages and an interest in antroposophie
I’ve translated relevant texts on fb. His daughter is also on fb and claims that G was a devout Muslim.
It is curious that those in the so-called “Traditionalist School” prefer to live in the West, which they criticize. If initiation is so important, you’d think they would all be rushing to the East to join a veritable Sufi organization. You can draw your own conclusions, or not. (And just because someone “starts” a Sufi club, that does not necessarily have any significance.)
Guenon’s correspondence was voluminous. Which correspondence in particular were you referring to and where is it available to read? And where can we read what his daughter wrote about him ?
@Leonardo, perhaps you need to read his correspondence or what Guenon’s daughter wrote about him. How he actually lived might not match your fantasies about him.
So he knew Guénon, but faith of simpler people? Suffism? I don’t think so.
Is this not the tragedy of Rene Guenon who, being gifted with a developed metaphysical sense and yet lacking the Hermetic-philosophical sense, sought, always and everywhere, the concrete spiritual. And finally, tired of the world of abstractions, he hoped to find liberation from intellectualism by plunging himself into the element of fervour of the Moslem masses at prayer in a Cairo mosque. The last hope of a soul thirsty for mystical experience and languishing in the captivity of the intellect? If so, may divine mercy grant him what he sought so much.
There is room to remark here that the last orientation of Rene Guenon, i.e. towards the faith of simpler people adhering to a more simple religion, is not without reason. For the Hermetic-philosophical sense has more in common with the plain and sincere faith of simple people than abstract metaphysics has.
Just as prayer leads to mystical union of the soul with the Divine, so does meditation lead to grasping a direct knowledge of eternal and immutable principles. Rene Guenon named this experience of the union of the particular intellect with the universal Intellect (the nous of Plotinus and the Stoics)—as well as the doctrines which result from it—”metaphysical”. He summarised his leading ideas on this “metaphysics” in a conference on “oriental metaphysics” which he gave at the Sorbonne in 1925 — which thesis one finds reproduced in Paul Sedir’s book Histoire et doctrine des rose-croix
Any indications Tomberg knew Guénon’s writings?
@Alek p.
First of all,
Have you read Tomberg’s work at all, and if yes, have you understood it – is the first question that comes to mind. If you have understood it and read his work, then I see no point in you asking these questions as well as answering likewise.
Important question here, for those who are nowadays exploring the Western Wisdom Tradition, is what is it that Christianity offers that is not found in more agreeable and intellectually satisfying form in, say, Hinduism? Nothing… Tomberg failed to make an argument for the Church.
@Cologero & DennisW
Interestingly it appears for one to arrive at those experiences is related to the struggles that truly define man, “The real battle then is spiritual, not intellectual.”
Breaching from asking intellectual or ‘intellectualized?’ questions and then focusing on the experience and understanding from a text such as the one presented or any text at all can be difficult and essential to move past a worldview based on rationality. Given that most of our learning today is centered around the intellect, that seems to us one of the ‘natural’ tendencies to follow now by ‘learning’ intellectually, but maybe the intellect’s purpose in this realm is to follow logically and be free from bias but not to be the actual method of ‘learning’.
To achieve those experiences, which we believe becomes real learning, we focus on the intellect in such a way with our abilities to purify it, or the self in relation to it to purify it? Then experiences, ‘true experiences’ can be had, in which it is organic to see the true world, which corresponds exactly to what the Church describes. That seems to be a true freedom because it is organic choice, purified and unchained, an arrival at an understanding or perception, that when there is no conflict with what the Church teaches, is it even so much as a conversion as simply being there: ‘together’ or as one?
“such a move cannot be understood in the conventional sense as the rejection of one thing and the adoption of another.” Really it is nothing even about Steiner or Anthroposophy for Tomberg, they simply became totally irrelevant to Truth.
Instead of pointless speculation, Dennis, perhaps you should make an effort to really understand the text.
First of all, (1) “The way of Hermeticism comprises authentic experiences” and (2) one inevitably experiences that spiritual reality corresponds to what the Church teaches
So an intelligent question would be “How does one achieve such experiences?” But you never asked that question.
Both your and Mr Konrad’s incomprehension is disappointing to me, but it demonstrates that mere intellectual discussions are insufficient.
If one can’t see Tomberg’s conversion to Catholic Church as a rejection of his anthroposophical past, then what are we to make of statements contained in Tomberg’s letter to a young man who sought him out in 1970, such as:
1. “…you would not encounter the one who emerged as the author of the ‘Studies’ in the thirties and who represented a centrally focussed spiritual science – simply for the reason that he isn’t there. He no longer exists.”
2. “The inner descendent of this same person today believes that there is no spiritual science and never can be. Because even a spiritual science based on its central focus can only add to the mill of death.”
3. “No pope has ever demanded of mankind such an extent of trust as the ‘spiritual scientist’ or initiate Rudolf Steiner.”
4. “The distance which separates me from him (the Tomberg of the 30s) today is as big as two incarnations…Nothing lies further from me today or would be more tiring than to see the ashes of the Anthroposophical past raised up…Shield me from discussions about the ‘Studies’, methods of work and similar things, which are now totally alien to me.”
Given that Tomberg did still refer to Steiner himself positively on a number of occasions in his later Catholic writings, perhaps he was merely rejecting what the General Anthroposophical Society had made of Anthroposophy and Steiner studies, rather than rejecting Anthroposophy and Steiner properly understood (and leavened with a proper understanding of the richness and depth of Church Tradition)?
There is the natural world and the super-natural world. The former is predicated on the latter.
The first quote given in your opening salvo, via Tomberg in Letter XI, is brilliant in its simplicity. I parsed it with two things in mind:
first, to paraphrase a comment I read recently, Catholicism is more than a religion, it’s a complex intellectual tradition;
and second, the profound words of St. Augustine when he affirmed that in order to have understanding one first must have faith; leading with faith, all the needed understanding and rationale necessary will be given to the one who approaches with faith.
I would agree with everything in Tomberg’s aforementioned quote. My experience, and subsequent understanding, has taken me to the very same conclusions.
Fascinating read on a number of levels.