In Arcanum VIII Justice, Valentin Tomberg discusses the ideal of equilibrium, which is the general meaning of the card. Although many readers consider that meaning to be the goal of their efforts, on the contrary, that is just the first step on the path to the Hermetic meaning. Tomberg explains:
[The meaning] does not lie in the generality obtained by the method of abstraction, but rather in the depth obtained by the method of penetration.
The most abstract ideas are most superficial. One of the meanings of the first commandment – Thou shalt have no other gods before me – is that one should not substitute an intellectual abstraction of God for the spiritual reality of God.
Thus abstractions like the First Cause or the Absolute are not substitutes for the living reality of God. Nevertheless, they have their use as a starting point for a deeper meditation. We read:
Because no one accepts a hypothesis as absolute truth, just as no one worships a sacred image as absolute reality. Yet hypotheses are fruitful in that they lead us to the truth, in guiding us to it within the totality of our experience … a concept or abstract idea does not replace spiritual reality, but rather gives an impulse and direction towards it … Let us take abstract ideas as hypotheses leading to the truth.
The following passage, published in 1914, expresses the same notion.
The intellectual arguments for the existence of God are necessarily of a somewhat dry and speculative nature … The arguments will prove that God exists, but they will not present God vividly as a real living person, felt to be existing and intimately present, as an imposing reality exercising, so to speak, the magnetism of personality on the soul … Man does not live by pure intellect alone. What he longs for, what he is influenced by, is concrete reality Now this is precisely the purpose of the religious instinct—to seize on the dry, cold, abstract truth of the intellect, and to make it concrete; to clothe the dry bones with flesh, and warm the cold speculative idea till its object is vividly realized as a present and imposing thing. It is only when this happens that God will become in practical effect a Being to be reckoned with, and to be entered into communion with as the object of religious worship and moral service. ~ Ernest Hull, God, Man, and Religion