In this study, written largely during the winter of 1966–1967, Valentin Tomberg leads the reader into the strata of a deeper reality. The path begins with knowledge of the kingdom of nature, looked at from two points of view: Darwin’s evolutionary “fallen nature” of the serpent (whose guiding principle is “the collective will to power”) and the cooperation, association, and social collectivism also apparent in nature (pointing to a region of created beings rather than to an evolutionary “origin of species”). Tomberg then asks whether human beings are permitted to do everything they can do, which brings him to the kingdom of man. Here the “pure humanism” of this kingdom manifests itself. But we are further called to raise ourselves out of both the kingdom of nature and the “pure humanism” of the kingdom of man, to the kingdom of God. For this, the Sermon on the Mount informs us of our true nature and points our way. If, in the old natural evolution, the solution was “you shall be as God” (by which the serpent meant “you shall be as God without God”), then the Sermon on the Mount promises “you shall be as God in God.” When humanity shall at last have understood this rightly, there will, according to Tomberg, be a new historiography telling first of temptations, deserts, errors, and the way of purification. In this book, Tomberg shows himself to be its forerunner.
Praise
“Valentin Tomberg’s Thy Kingdom Come: The New Evolution of the Good, written toward the end of his life, is as prophetic a work as he has left us. With his attention to the spreading darkness of scientific materialism that more and more has replaced not only religion but even God in modernity, Tomberg speaks to our own time with a sense of urgency and alarm that must have been almost impossible to believe while he wrote. Yet, here we are. In this book, Tomberg offers us the miracle of healing this modern disease, grounded in the source of all true healing: the ever-flowing waters of the Christian Mystery.”
—MICHAEL MARTIN
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.
