Valentin Tomberg and the Ecclesia Universalis

I recently reviewed (PE 142) Harrie Salman’s excellent comparative spiritual biography of Peter Deunov and Rudolf Steiner as Christian mystics. In this biography of Valentin Tomberg (1900-1973) he revisits some of the same themes, especially since Tomberg worked closely with the Anthroposophical movement during part of his career. The book is divided into periods spent in different places – Russia, Estonia, the Netherlands, Germany, and finally England. Harrie sees Tomberg’s work as part of a movement ‘aimed at developing a new spiritual culture in which human thought might regain access to the world of spirit.’ According to Steiner, this would involve a collaboration between what he called Platonists and Aristotelians – an important theme that runs through the book. Tomberg himself sought to conjoin intellectuality with spirituality, developing an esoteric dimension of depth.

Aristotelian types tend to focus on sense perception and conceptual thinking, connected by Steiner to the Archangel Michael. By contrast, Eastern Europeans operate more in terms of ‘imaginations, inspirations, and intuitions’ characteristic of revelatory knowledge and the Platonic type connected with Sophia or Divine Wisdom. Broadly speaking, these can be mapped onto Iain McGilchrist’s left and right hemisphere forms of attention, which, of course, need to operate harmoniously together as in a concordance of science and spirituality. Harrie traces the influence of Platonism in the West, including the School of Chartres, the Italian Renaissance, the Rosicrucians, German idealism, and the Russian Sophiologists Vladimir Solovyov, Pavel Florensky and Sergei Bulgakov. During this process, the spiritual science of nature was overtaken by mechanistic philosophy. This brings him to the contribution of Steiner and other 20^th-century developments concerned with the spiritualisation of intelligence (pp. 220-221). He argues that Steiner had hoped to bring together the three impulses of Michael, Sophia and Christ.

Tomberg’s axis was Christ-Sophia as a counterpoint to predominantly masculine Aristotelianism, and he evolves from Christian-Platonist to Christian-Hermeticist, culminating in his extraordinary work (published anonymously) recommended to me by Bede Griffiths in 1992, Meditations on the Major Arcana of the Tarot, which I read in the original French – I remember buying it in Paris. Tomberg defines moral logic or the logic of love as the head and heart united: ‘It is therefore that which unites meditation and prayer.’ (p. 238) Practically, this involves the balance of tradition and renewal (‘the stream from above to below and that from below to above’). Readers will recognise Harrie’s remark about the people detaching themselves from the Church and seeking ‘instead their own spiritual insight and spiritual experiences to free themselves from the scientific dogmas of materialism.’ (p. 246)

In 1940, Tomberg composed the extraordinary Our Mother Prayer received in Russian during a meditation and translated by him into German. It is in many ways a mirror of the Lord’s prayer, where the Mother is exiled 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 corporeality.

Receive this day the living memory of Thee from human hearts, who implore Thee to forgive the fault of forgetting Thee.’

We have indeed forgotten the Sacred Feminine and the Divine Sophia, and it is emphatically time to remember, to meditate and pray on this, to bring Her power into the world (see also the letter from Helena Roerich in this issue). Tomberg explains: ‘One day we will experience the guilt of forgetting the name of the Mother. We will take up the struggle against the evil in the world that led Paradise to disappear, leaving the Mother in darkness. The interminable suffering of the Father on account of His separation from the Mother will be stilled through the Son. To Sophia belongs the homeland and the bounty and the mercy for all things and all beings in the round of existence.’ It is a remarkable vision from wartime, and its spirit very much resonates with Anne Baring’s Messages from a Transcendent Dimension reviewed in the previous issue. Readers can also consult Tomberg’s Rosary Prayer (pp. 152-3). Harrie explains that it was in the spiritual darkness of World War II that Tomberg ‘built his ark’ and joined the Catholic Church, distancing himself from the Orthodox Church.

Tomberg proposes that we must symbolically become our own Pope and Emperor, as represented in the corresponding Tarot cards – this is the voice of the free human being involving ‘the path of “transformation, transubstantiation, and transmutation of human consciousness,” the path of reunion of the “true self” with the “lower self,” of the “image of God” with the “likeness of God” as the path of initiation and individuation uniting spirit with soul.’ I have chosen to focus on some central themes, but the book also recounts a great deal of detail about Tomberg’s life, work and relationships, especially in connection with the Anthroposophical Society of the 1920s and his other spiritual activities thereafter. What remains critical for our time is the spiritualisation of intelligence in ways that nurture the life of the soul as in the Platonic Academy, especially in view of the rapid development and deployment of AI. Harrie observes that ‘an automated Ahrimanic intelligence offers no opening for the creative and moral activity of the human self’ so our task is to unmask the lies and deceptions of materialism and create new forms of cooperation, including with spiritual beings, so as to restore our connection with Cosmic Intelligence. This illuminating book shows how Tomberg walked that path to help birth a culture of Christ and Sophia, of Love and Wisdom.