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Proclamation on Sinai

Proclamation on Sinai

Covenant and Commandments

By Valentin Tomberg

180 pp

$17.95
$17.95
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About the Book

In his final years, Valentin Tomberg (1900-1973) completed three short works. The present book is the last of these. The first, Thy Kingdom Come: The New Evolution of the Good, and the second, Lazarus: The Miracle of Resurrection in World History, were published by Angelico Press in 2022. Why, towards the end of his life, after having already included a profound series of contemplations on the ten commandments in Letter XI of his magisterial Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey into Christian Hermeticism, did he return so intensively to this theme? Tomberg does not tell us directly, but the text itself suggests an answer. Here he looks back to major themes of the two phases of his life. The first of these themes, the origin of law (see his The Art of the Good: On the Regeneration of Fallen Justice), is discussed in this final book as a "path through the wilderness" such as he himself had to walk as a lifelong émigré (see Valentin Tomberg and the Ecclesia Universalis: A Biography). The second theme, the fundamental path of the soul in quest of personal certainty(see his Personal Certainty: On the Way, the Truth, and the Life, in press), he returns to as "essentialism," which he now approaches from the perspective of knowledge as an analogical process steeped in symbols: the Jewish kabbalah, the Decalogue, the Names of God, the Catholic church, the meaning of the papacy, and much else besides. The choirs of the spiritual hierarchies receive fresh appreciation, in association with reiterated respect for the life-work of Rudolf Steiner, with which he had been deeply aligned during the first half of his life. Finally, the "transfiguration of the dark clouds into light" on Mt. Sinai, as here portrayed, signals Tomberg's renewed immersion in what he calls the moral chronicle of the world, leading him to culminating insights into the origin of Divine Law from the vantage-point of his own "ascent of Sinai."



Praise

“In this deeply Christian esoteric work, Valentin Tomberg draws upon the wealth of his wisdom to elucidate the spiritual meaning of the Ten Commandments. One uniquely profound message of the book is that we are to honor our Father and our Mother, as she appears in her three aspects.”

—Harrie Salman

author of Valentin Tomberg and the Ecclesia Universalis: A Biography

 

“Every sentence of this extraordinary work makes clear that Valentin Tomberg wears the mantle of Moses for our time. His stunning combination of sweeping metahistorical insights with exact and exacting fine-grained historical commentary brings forth the Ten Commandments as living principles for right now.”

—Kevin Dann

Contributing Editor, Public Domain Review 

 

“This multivalent meditation on the Ten Commandments marries elements from Rudolf Steiner’s insights (above all in terms of the angelic hierarchies) with Tomberg’s profound embrace of Catholic tradition and dogma. Here an authentic Christian genius seeks to set us free from ‘the house of bondage’ of our deterministic, desacralized age.”

—Roger Buck

author of Cor Jesu Sacratissimum: From Secularism and the New Age to Christendom Renewed

“In this profound book, the Decalogue rises up again—penetrating deeply into the essence of God’s archetypal language and inviting us to ‘ascend Mt Sinai’ and enter into the darkness where God is. It girds us with the unshakable power of enduring Truth. The contemporary relevance of this book is inestimable.”

—Claudia McLaren Lainson

author of The Circle of Twelve and the Legacy of Valentin Tomberg



About the Author

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.

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