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 the dissertation here published in English for the first time. This dissertation marked an important turning-point in Tomberg's life: humanistic studies he had presented during his thirties are now…mehr
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 the dissertation here published in English for the first time. 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 he 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.
In his teens and twenties, Russian-born Valentin Tomberg (1900-1973) was already exploring not only the Orthodox influences in his home city of St. Petersburg, but also such currents as those of Theosophy, Anthroposophy, Kabbalism, and Hermeticism. In his thirties, he emerged as a leading anthroposophical researcher. As an emigré from revolutionary Russia, he went first to Estonia (where his mother was shot dead in the street by Red Army soldiers), then to Holland, where his work bore increasingly the imprint of the stream of Platonism. During the years 1940-1943, Tomberg worked with a small group unveiling ever deeper layers of the Our Father prayer (and introduced what he called the Our Mother prayer). When the Nazi occupation brought this work to an end, he turned increasingly to the subjects of jurisprudence and the Hermetic tradition. During this period, he joined the Catholic Church. There followed intense work on "Christian Hermeticism," on display in his masterpiece, Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey into Christian Hermeticism. Tomberg's works raised controversies: in particular, fundamental questions regarding the relationship between Anthroposophy and the Catholic Church. In his late writings (Thy Kingdom Come: The New Evolution of the Good; Lazarus: The Miracle of Resurrection in World History; and Proclamation on Sinai: Covenant and Commandments), he revisited this question, illuminating thematically and historically the pivotal significance of an ongoing development of Christian culture wherein all of eternal value in the past will in time be resurrected (retrospectively, as it were) into the Universal Church, or, as the first English-language biography of Tomberg calls it, the "Ecclesia universalis."
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