“A thinking, praying Christian of unmistakable purity reveals to us the symbols of Christian Hermeticism . . . summarized in the 22 so-called Major Arcana of the Tarot, seeking to lead us meditatively into the deeper, all-embracing wisdom of the Catholic Mystery.”
— CARDINAL HANS URS VON BALTHASAR
“Ever since Hans Urs von Balthasar’s endorsement of Meditations on the Tarot, theologians have increasingly begun to see that Christian esotericism is not necessarily heterodox or ‘gnostic,’ despite many ambiguities. To the contrary, the future of orthodoxy, its more radical cleaving to the biblical revelation, and above all its metaphysical coherence, may depend upon a new engagement with Sophiology, theurgic Neoplatonism, and Hermeticism.”
— JOHN MILBANK
author of Beyond Secular Order
“True Christianity, says the New Age, has been lost, or, alternatively, retreated to some esoteric circle. Meditations on the Tarot, however, shows that Christianity has not been lost, but lives and breathes in precisely those institutions and teachings that to New Agers appear opposed to the life of the Spirit.”
— STRATFORD CALDECOTT
author of The Radiance of Being
“Recognized by many leading thinkers as among the pivotal spiritual texts of the twentieth century, every paragraph leads deeper into the Christ mystery.”
— ROBERT POWELL
translator
“In this work of staggering insight, intelligence, imagination, and service, an anonymous Catholic author metabolizes diverse cultural and spiritual terrains while participating in the Mystical Body of Christ. His recovery of Christian Hermeticism is quite simply manna in the desert.”
— THERESE SCHROEDER-SHEKER
Chalice of Repose Project
Valentin Tomberg was born in St. Petersburg on February 26, 1900. Having been baptized a Protestant, he entered the Greek Orthodox church shortly before 1933, and, in 1945, became a Roman Catholic. In 1938 Tomberg emigrated to the Netherlands and began actively to lecture on Christological topics. At the beginning of 1944 he moved to Cologne, where he was awarded the title of Doctor of Law for his dissertation, The Art of the Good: On the Regeneration of Fallen Justice, published in English for the first time by Angelico Press. This dissertation marked an important turning-point in Tomberg’s life: humanistic studies he had presented during his thirties are now replaced by a strict orientation towards a Platonic model of knowledge, and a medieval, so-called “realism of universals.” Tomberg came to regard the modern path away from natural law (founded upon religion) and toward legal positivism (oriented toward power) as a dismantling of the different levels of law (and at the same time a loss of both the idea and ideal of law)—that is, as a process of degeneration or “fall,” which Tomberg seeks to reverse in the direction of regeneration. He also proposes a new way of organizing the academic study of law, in which the higher levels of law would be included, and in which access to the idea and the ideal of law would be restored.
