Meditations on the Tarot

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Meeting Notes for 8 May 2017

We discussed the task about moods. For this week, choose any task, e.g., doorways, handling keys, or whatever works. When awareness comes, observe the body for any signs of tension. E.g., in the feet, clenched fists, crossed arms, hunched shoulders, etc. See if the body begins to relax as the awareness is intensified. All that tension throughout the day is not healthy.

It was noted that moods can colour our mentality. We might feel gloomy one day, yet positive another. This rhythm is consistent throughout life. This is a ripple from the Fall of Man: the desire to know good and evil. Hence, we tend to view life from one perspective or another. Thus, we adopt the “original sin” as our own, thus recapitulating the original fall. This is what is meant the Fall being “mythological”: “a symbol expressing correspondences between archetypes in the past and their manifestations in the present”, as described in the meditation on Letter I: The Magician. The way back is the alchemical marriage of opposites, rather than the seesaw effect of our common life.

In relation to the reading, our normal waking state of semi-awareness is like the darkness, i.e., unconscious. The task then is to look for signs of intelligent life in that darkness.

We read about Daath starting on page 506 and ended at page 509 of Meditations on the Tarot with the Third Great Arcanum. Next time, we will continue with the following paragraph about the Second Great Arcanum.

(NOTE about the translation: the word “geniality” is misleading in English, as it does not mean the same thing as its French cognate. It really means something like “brilliant” or ingenious, not being a pleasant person.)

Daath is not one of the Sephiroth, since we are not born with it. It is something that needs to be created, that is, it is related to the second birth. Traditionally, it was called the “intellect illuminated by grace.” Grace actualizes the knowledge of being in the “image and likeness of God”, which otherwise is merely latent. This certainly accords with empirical experience. If we were born with that knowledge, then there would be no denial of God. Compare to our inborn need for food, water, and air.

Daath is the union of intelligence and wisdom. Or the union of discursive knowledge and the revelations known by faith.

It Scholastic terms, there are likewise three stages:

Metaphysics: discursive knowledge (i.e., its highest expression), what can be known by thinking, i.e., purely human wisdom.
Theology: the knowledge revealed by faith
Mystical Theology: the experiential knowledge of God, direct gnosis, beyond both reason and faith.

At lower levels – that is, what the Kabbalah refers to as worlds – there is a foreshadowing of gnosis in artistic creation and in love between the sexes. Few reach the knowledge of Daath. More – but still relatively few – are able to experience aesthetic ecstasy in great poetry, literature, music or art. Yet, love between the sexes seems within reach for most people, so there is always a desperate and frenzied search for it, even for ersatz imitations of it. If you’ve ever been in love, or experienced sexual pleasure, you know how fleeting it is, or even, unfortunately, how it may devolve into pain.

Vraiment commencent amours en joie et finissent en douleurs. ~ Merlin

Imagine, then, how much more satisfying gnosis is.

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Prophets of Electrum

Consciousness in man is pre-eminently intellect. It might have been, it ought, so it seems, to have been also intuition. Intuition and intellect represent two opposite directions of the work of consciousness: intuition goes in the very direction of life, intellect goes in the inverse direction, and thus finds itself naturally in accordance with the movement of matter. A complete and perfect humanity would be that in which these two forms of conscious activity should attain their full development. ~ Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution

Here is the difference between the nature of intelligence and that of intuition of faith, between the principle of autumn and that of spring. The former is understanding of that which is; the latter is participation in the becoming of that which is to be. ~ Meditations on the Tarot, Letter XVIII The Moon

[There is] a centre from which worlds shoot out like rockets in a fireworks display—provided, however, that I do not present this centre as a thing, but as a continuity of shooting out. God thus defined, has nothing of the already made; He is unceasing life, action, freedom. Creation, so conceived, is not a mystery; we experience it in ourselves when we act freely. ~ Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution

According to Valentin Tomberg, one of the tasks of Hermetism is to accomplish the alliance of intelligence and the intuition of faith—the alchemical marriage of the moon and the sun. Another way to put it is to obtain the alloy of silver and gold, which is called Electrum. Although some have come close to this ideal, it is a task still incomplete. Tomberg mentions several thinkers who have come close; these we will call the Prophets of Electrum.

At the top of those prophets is St. Thomas Aquinas whose thought is silvered gold. More common is gilded silver as expressed by Origen, Dionysius the Areopagite, Jacob Boehme, Louis Claude de Saint-Martin, Vladimir Solovyov, Nicolas Berdyaev, Henri Bergson and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.

The importance of Thomas Aquinas cannot be overestimated, even for Hermetists. The raison d’être of scholasticism is the union of faith and intelligence. Following his conversion to Catholicism, Tomberg wrote his graduate thesis on International Law from a Thomist perspective, so he is quite familiar with his work. Tomberg offers this insight, describing Thomism as the combustible that, when enflamed, gives rise to contemplation (given the influence of John of the Cross, we can assume this is the fruition of personal experience):

St. Thomas Aquinas was not the only one. Just as he arrived at contemplation through scholastic reasoning, so did the peak of the scholastic wave reach gnosis [mystique], that is to say, intuition or the state of union of faith and intelligence, which is the aim of scholasticism. A Meister Eckhart, a Ruysbroeck, the Admirable Doctor, a St. John of the Cross are in fact spirits amongst whom you will search in vain for a spirit of opposition to scholasticism. For them also it was true that scholasticism was “like straw”, but they knew at the same time from their own experience that this straw is an excellent combustible. They certainly surpassed scholasticism, but after having attained its aim. For the aim of scholastic effort is contemplation, and it is gnosis [mystique] which is the fruit of the scholastic tree. ~ Valentin Tomberg, Letter XIX The Sun

I have written about Nicolas Berdyaev here. For a brief summary of Louis Claude de Saint-Martin, see The Hidden Tradition. For Jacob Boehme, see Christian Gnosis: Jacob Boehme. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin is the scientist who approaches the ideal. He restored the subjective element to scientific objectivity, in his claim that there is an “inside” as well as an “outside” to everything. Any complete understanding of the world process needs to take that into account. I was astounded by the novelty and originality of The Phenomenon of Man when I read it several decades ago; I wish I could recapture that experience.

Although Tomberg writes extensively about Henri Bergson, I’d like to add a little more background. Finally, I’ll conclude with the influence of Vladimir Solovyov which, I believe, provides a view into Tomberg’s motivation.

Henri Bergson

Henri Bergson’s philosophy was born in the atmosphere of French spiritualism, a form of idealism prominent in Italy and France at the time. One influence, for example, was Emile Boutroux who in the Contingency of Physical Laws, claimed that life, feeling, and freewill need to be part of any understanding of Physical Laws. He rejected determinism, and instead claimed that natural laws as a sort of “habit” of things: what originally was also able to be a free act, in repeating itself, automatizes, and mechanizes itself and ends up appearing to be a necessity. A fortiori, this applies to human beings, who cannot be determined by environment, race, etc.

Bergson married a cousin of Marcel Proust and his brother-in-law was Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers, a founder of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Although born Jewish, Bergson felt closer to Catholicism, which he regarded as the fulfillment of Judaism. He never officially converted, however, because of the rise of National Socialism.

Although from a strictly logical point of view, his philosophical system can be refuted. The Church even banned his books. Rene Guenon, too, was critical of Bergson. However, that is not the Hermetic reading of Bergson, which is more concerned with Bergson’s insights than its logical presentation. Any useful critique of his thought would have to advance the alliance of intelligence and intuition. The standard critiques remain on one or the other side of that alliance, and therefore fall short of what is necessary.

In Bergson’s view, the intellect treats matter as inert, and is unable to discern the life that animates it. It chops Being up into pieces, so that “whatever is fluid in the real will escape it”. We see this starkly in the abortion debate: science cannot determine when “life begins in the womb”. The intelligent course of action in this case would be to admit that shortcoming of “science” and rely on one’s intuition. That seldom happens, so the modern world loves death and sterility.

Solovyov and Egyptian Theosophy

In a footnote to Lecture Six of Divine Humanity, Vladimir Solovyov informs us:

Although the close inner connection between Alexandrian theosophy and the Christian doctrine is one of the firmly established theses of Western scholarship, for one reason or another, this perfectly correct thesis does not enjoy common acknowledgement in our theological literature. Therefore, I consider it necessary to devote to this question a special appendix at the end of these lectures, where I will touch upon the significance of the native Egyptian theosophy (the revelations of Thoth or Hermes Trismegistus) in its relation to both the doctrines mentioned.

Unfortunately, this pregnant quotation is the theological equivalent of Fermat’s Last Theorem, since the promised appendix was never published. This section will try to begin the proof. First of all, the two doctrines in question are the dogmas of the Logos and the Trinity. These doctrines were developed metaphysically by Egyptian Neoplatonists from Philo to Plotinus independent of Christian revelation. What Christianity brought was the revelation that this divine life appeared as a fact, as an historical reality. Only later was this fact connected to Neoplatonic metaphysics. Now we see how Solovyov became a prophet of Electrum, uniting the intuition of faith with the intelligence of metaphysics.

So, how does this relate to Valentin Tomberg? In a lecture Inner Impulses of Evolution, Rudolf Steiner mentions Solvyov in relation to Ernest Renan and David Strauss. Renan wrote a Life of Christ that presumes that Jesus was simply a man living in Palestine at a certain historical time. Hence, he strips out all supernatural and miraculous elements from the Gospels.

Strauss’ Life of Christ, on the other hand, wrote from the perspective of Jesus’ followers. The miracles, for example, were mythical, i.e., creations of the early Christians to express their developing conception of Jesus. Since Strauss was a Hegelian, he did not deny spiritual reality in itself. Steiner interprets Strauss like this:

As Strauss sees it, in the course of mankind’s earthly development, from the times of the first beginnings of the earth to its final end, mankind has and always will have a higher power in it than the merely external power that develops on the physical plane. A power runs right through mankind that will forever address itself to the super-earthly; this super-earthly finds expression in myths. We know that man bears something super-sensible within him that seeks to find expression in myth since it cannot be expressed in external physical science. Thus, Strauss does not see Jesus in the single individual, but rather the Christ in all men.

Solovyov, on the other hand, focuses on Christ rather than Jesus, but on Christ as a living being, not as a Straussian abstract idea. Steiner describes it this way, perhaps with some exaggeration:

When we come to Soloviev, behold, Jesus is no more, but only the Christ. Nevertheless, it is the Christ conceived as living. Not working in men as an idea, with the consequence that its power is transformed in him into a myth, but rather working as a living Being who has no body, is always and ever present among men, and is, in effect, positively responsible for the external organization of human life, the founder of the social order.

Steiner’s lecture made quite an impression on the young Tomberg, who was inspired to study Solovyov in depth. Tomberg describes that encounter:

A result was the conviction that this author had never encountered a work written before the time of Rudolf Steiner that contained such a profound concept of the nature and mission of Jesus Christ, a view presented against the background of cosmic history.

The obvious question is how did Solovyov arrive at such a deep understanding. This perplexed Tomberg, since Solovyov certainly did not argue himself into his understanding, despite presenting his understanding in a logical way to others. Solovyov does mention three divine experiences of Sophia, including one in the Egyptian desert. We don’t know exactly what he was doing in Egypt, but we do know that Solovyov had become quite familiar with both the Kabbalah and Hermetism. He regarded Paracelsus, Boehme, and Emmanuel Swedenborg as “substantial individuals”. He was also familiar with Johann Gichtel, so he would have known of Gichtel’s correspondence of the chakras with the planets.

So we can read the Letters on the Tarot as the promised appendix to Divine Humanity. Tomberg explains in the foreward:

these Letters are intended only to serve, to sustain, and to support the Hermetic tradition — from its first appearance in the epoch of Hermes Trismegistus, lost in the remoteness of antiquity and become legendary

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The Descent into Hell

Since the Fall, Earth’s karma is death. Everything we do will result in decay, disappointment, or death. It is a common misunderstanding that the ancients believed the Earth to be a privileged place, at the centre of the universe. That is not true. Esoterically, Earth not centre of universe, but rather quite far from God. It is separated from it by the hierarchy of angels, the astral layer and the planetary layers. Moreover, Earth is closest to Hell, located at its very centre.

Knowing this, the secular world dares not to hope for more. On the contrary, the world worships death and sterility. It denies that human life is breathed into matter by a living god. Rather, it claims that the human spirit spontaneously arises from matter. Its goal is the creation of a golem, the artificial man. It wants to overcome death by technology, like the Frankenstein monster. Ultimately, the goal is the replacement of human beings by androids as though, somehow, a soul will spontaneously arise out of electronic circuitry and Python code. Only mechanical and logical memory matter, as there is not even an awareness of moral and vertical memory.

That is the world Jesus is incarnated into.

The Death of Jesus

The incarnation must include death as the end of life. However, although death is a fact, it is not a positive principle willed by God. The spirit cannot die, so it is more appropriate to refer to death as “dormition”.

Since Jesus is not subject to Adam’s curse, his death is voluntary. Death did not end his earthly ministry; the time of the entombment is analogous to the Sabbath rest. Since his death was voluntary, i.e., not necessary, it is thereby sacrificial and redemptive.

Human death is the separation of the soul and spirit from the body. The animal soul does not possess immortality, so, at death, the soul receives the life principle from the spirit. Yet is also retains the possibility of death due to sin. Without the body, the soul is mere potency, so it becomes petrified, retaining what it accumulated during life. This is illustrated in the novel Laurus:

Arseny’s soul wanted to touch Ursina’s soul … Get used to separation, said Death, it is painful, even if it is only temporary. Will we recognize each other in eternity? asked Arseny’s soul. That depends in large part on you, said Death: souls often harden during the course of life and then they barely recognize anyone after death.

That is, the soul has forgotten its life. In the Meditation on the Arcanum of Death, this is related to the loss of mechanical and logical memory. To the extent that the soul, during its life, had a strong moral memory, the soul will not have become so hard. Thus, the soul can either burden the spirit after death or else leave it free for its postmortem being. Death is the entry into the spiritual world, so it is both initiatic and cathartic. As such, it is not just a punishment, but also a blessing.

As Hermetists, we desire initiation while alive, understanding initiation as the entry into the spiritual world. This is facilitated through “vertical memory”, “which links the plane of ordinary consciousness to planes or states of consciousness higher than that of ordinary consciousness”. It provides us with the certainty of God and the spiritual world.

Christ experienced this human death. The cry of “into thy hands I commend my spirit” refers to the separation of the body from the spirit. The body was then buried in the cave. In the postmortem state, Christ descended into Hell. Hell referred to the postmortem state of all human souls before Christ; this is the case not just in the Old Testament, but also in paganism.

Of course, hell is not a “place” in the sense that Ohio is a place, so the descent was not a movement from one place to another. Rather, it is the movement from one state of being to another. Since Christ’s divine nature never separated from this human nature, his ministry continued after death, including to those who had previously died. Like the two thieves, there are two possible destinies for those souls in hell: continuation in hell or else in paradise.

Even though Christ’s body was incorruptible, it was nevertheless a real experience of death. This is revealed by the descent into hell, i.e., the separation of the soul from the body. Death was voluntary, and that is why it had to be an unnatural death, viz., death by execution.

The Possibilities

If our karma is death, we must learn to act without concern for results. That is, the act may not bear fruit right away, not until certain obstacles will have fallen away. There is the tendency today to expect instant results, irrespective of the karmic possibilities, or the facticity, of the moment. If we believe that death has been overcome, we can be assured that “everything sown in the field of death will rise again one day” [~ Valentin Tomberg]

References
Sergius Bulgakov, The Lamb of God: The Death of Christ and His Descent into Hell
Anonymous, Meditations on the Tarot: Letter XIII Death
Eugene Vodolazkin, Laurus

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Death and Resurrection

Amen, amen I say to you, you shall see the heaven opened, and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of man. ~ John 1:51

The revelation of the spiritual world in death is the greatest joy and an ineffable triumph for all those who, in this life, yearned for this spiritual world from which they had been exiled. But death is an inexpressible horror, anguish, and torment for those who did not want this spiritual world, did not know it, rejected it. ~ Sergius Bulgakov

Fall

Before meditating on the seven stages of the passion, we should, as the Meditations suggest, first clarify the story of Creation and the Fall. Then the meaning of Redemption can be understood in the context of the restoration of the state of being prior to the Fall. The Fall is an historical event, although not an empirical event. That is, there is no physical or archeological trace of it, but just a nearly forgotten memory that sometimes intrudes into consciousness.

Because of the lack of a corporeal body, the fall of the angels was conscious, deliberate, and self-willed. The demons are pure evil, revolt against God. The effects have been a perversion of creation, as the demons interacted with the world. They brought a sickness into creation, affecting the natural, the animal, as well as the human world.

Adam and Eve, before the Fall, were aware of living in God’s presence and the angels “ascending and descending”. Nevertheless, they have their “own” world over which they were given dominion. In some ways, this world seems to persist apart from God so that God has become today, if at all, a matter of faith. Since man had tasks to perform, he was not complete.

So even though there was the possibility of believing in a world apart from God, the Fall of man did not originate in his own consciousness, but rather from an external source. This was the whispered temptation of the serpent, itself a result of the Fall of the angels. Nevertheless, unlike their Fall, man’s Fall was not the result of a fully conscious rejection of God. Rather it was the result of deception, gullibility, and misunderstanding.

First there was the subtlety of the serpent’s deception and the naïveté that believed it. The misunderstanding was that knowledge could be achieved horizontally within the world (eating the fruit of the tree) without reference to any higher world. Man then came to know good and evil, i.e., a mixture: he was no longer fully good, yet he was still not fully evil.

The consequence was that the awareness of God and the spiritual world because obscured. The “garments of animal skins” refers to a densification of human existence. The center of gravity of the soul life descended in the direction from the spirit to corporeality. This new center was in the lowest three chakras, i.e., the animal life of man’s soul. These centers represent:

Fear, anxiety, worry, and shame
Sexuality, sensuality, and an attachment to the glamour of the world
Hunger, the desire to take

This can be verified by meditation on the Creation and Fall. As we learned in the Letter on the Magician, Adam and Eve are archetypes, which “manifest themselves endlessly in history and in each individual biography”. Thus it becomes a matter of remembering what had been forgotten.

Death

So now we can understand the purpose of death. The only way back to the awareness of higher worlds is total separation of the soul from the body, so it can reunite with the spirit. Obviously, this is what we call “death”. It is a harsh measure, yet the only effective option.

At death, the soul carries with it all its experiences of life, its acts and omissions, its sins and merits. It will become aware once again of the spiritual world and will know Christ as judge. It will then understand its life in its wholeness. Of course, an effort at that self-understanding should be made part of our spiritual task, in preparation for death.

If the soul’s mystical union with God is forgetting of the phenomenal world and recollection of God, death is simultaneously the call from above and forgetting what is below. As such, death is more like a dormition, a leaving behind of earthly life in anticipation of a return. The soul becomes the new body of the spirit, sort of an “astral” body. Yet the soul is also the form of the corporeal body, so at some point it will be the form of another corporeal body, a resurrection body.

The Redemption, then, aims at the elimination of death as the path of return to the state prior to the Fall.

As a reminder, these are the seven phases of the Passion. The meditations will being with the “washing of the feet”.

Washing of the feet
The scourging
Crown of thorns
The way of the cross
The crucifixion
The entombment
The resurrection

Washing of the Feet

for some the superman has more attraction than the Son of Man, and because he promises them a career of increasing power, whilst the Son of Man offers only a career of “foot washing” ~ From Letter VII, The Chariot

Several years ago, at a Maundy Thursday mass, I was selected as one of the men whose feet would be washed by the priest. In my meditations, the memory of that event came back to me. I recall that I felt quite awkward and embarrassed. I was slow getting my sock and shoe off, forcing the priest to wait. The experience was unpleasant.

Like Adam and Eve, who felt ashamed in the presence of God and had to cover themselves, I likewise felt ashamed in baring my foot. Yet, if one’s whole being – spirit, soul, and body – is to be redeemed, then Christ has to descend all the way down to the feet. It is one thing to illumine the intellect or the heart, another one to bring it down to the feet, i.e., all of terrestrial life. In an early work, Valentin Tomberg explains:

The general effect of meditation consists in the fact that what is spiritual in a human being descends … into the human personality… Just as Christ bowed down before his disciples and washed their feet, so in every meditation the angel bows down and washes the feet of the meditator.

Once again, we “see” the angels ascending and descending.

References:
Anonymous, Meditations on the Tarot
Sergius Bulgakov, The Bride of the Lamb
Valentin Tomberg, Inner Development

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Stages of Hermetic Meditation

The Aim of Meditation

In the Letter on the Fool, we learn that Christian meditation pursues the aim of deepening the two divine revelations:

Holy Scripture
Creation

Ultimately, this will awaken a consciousness and appreciation of Christ’s work of Redemption. Hence, our meditation will lead to contemplation of the seven stages of the Passion. That task will be a follow up to this essay.

Sacrifice

To understand the Redemption, it is first necessary to start with understanding the cosmic significance of the idea of Sacrifice. In the Letter on the Emperor, we learn of two sacrifices:

Creation is a sacrifice: to allow freedom
Incarnation is a sacrifice: the fact of freedom

Creation is effected by a divine contraction and by voluntary divine powerlessness, which is akin to crucifixion. Freedom is the key to understanding Providence in history. On the one hand, without freedom, God would be a “divine tyrant”; yet on the other hand, because of man’s freedom, God’s power may be falsely doubted. Tomberg summarizes it:

God is all-powerful in history inasmuch as there is faith; he is crucified insofar as one turns away from him.

The fact of freedom led to the Incarnation. The sacrifice is not limited to the cross, since the Incarnation itself was a sacrifice. Sergius Bulgakov in Sophia: The Wisdom of God describes it this way.

Christ underwent all the limitations and infirmities of human life. He was subject to every human propensity: he experienced hunger and thirst, exhaustion, grief, temptation. … The agony [of the cross] provides clear evidence at once of the reality of his human nature and of the depth of his self-abasement.

Moreover, his understanding of man’s nature was not sugar-coated as it so often is today. Christ was fully aware of the human race living in spiritual darkness with stupidity, weakness, sloth, lust, injustice, disease … in short, sin. This was accompanied by the awareness of God’s wrath. Bulgakov concludes:

in his human nature the representative human feels the force of the sin of the whole world pressing upon him, the horror, for the one sinless being, of contact with sin, and of the justice of God outraged thereby.

Stages of Meditation

Tomberg describes three stages of meditation, above our ordinary waking consciousness. These stages, in a sense, correspond to the four levels of interpretation of sacred writings. These are summarized in the following table:

Stage	Object	Experience	Interpretation
Objective Consciousness	External images and sounds	Sensory phenomena	Literal
Imagination	Concentration on an inner image	Perception of spiritual phenomena	Allegorical
Inspiration	Inner silence, listening	Spiritual communications	Moral
Intuition	Beyond words and thoughts	Spiritual identification	Anagogical

In our ordinary state of objective consciousness, we learn the faith through sensory images and hearing. Exoteric faith is learned through images such as icons, statues, stained glass, art work, and the like. It is also taught by an authority.

Imagination

The beginning of meditation is our imagination (which Tomberg also calls “vision”) by which we try to concentrate on interior images. We try to visualize the events, perhaps even placing ourselves in them. Tomberg describes this as augmenting our experience. Objective consciousness is passive in respect to experiences, but the imagination is active. This may lead to the perception of spiritual phenomena, as described by several saints and venerables. Anne Catherine Emmerich and Maria d’Agreda have been such visionaries.

St. Francis de Sales describes this stage as the mind meditating on a subject with the aid of the imagination and discourse or reasoning.

Inspiration

In inspiration, we try to quiet the mind, listening silently. Whereas imagination requires effort, this stage is the beginning of concentration without effort. In silence, the gifts of understanding or wisdom may be received. Ideas or dogmas that seemed to be difficult to understand begin to make sense. Sometimes, issues in your own life will be cleared up. You may find that things “just happen” favourably. Not necessarily in your material life, but more so in your spiritual life, as one depends more and more on this for moral guidance.

Intuition

At the stage of ordinary consciousness, the source of knowledge or faith is from beyond one’s own being. Even at the stage of imagination, the images are still in a sense external, as something the I actively creates and envisions. There is still some of that in inspiration, although the process is passive rather than active; the source is beyond the I. In other words, there is the I, or Self, confronting an experience, whether sensory or spiritual.

In the stage of intuition, however, all images, words, and thoughts are relinquished. This may even feel like a “dark night”, a time of abandonment. The consolations of spiritual visions and communications seem to disappear. That is because the I itself must go. It is not a matter of a new and elevated experience, but rather a transformation of one’s very being.

Tomberg gives us the example of St Paul on the road to Damascus, to illustrate the three stages of vision, inspiration, and imagination:

Vision: He had the vision of Christ
Inspiration: He received communication
Intuition: No longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me

Purgation of the Senses and the Spirit

Given the importance of St. John of the Cross in the Meditations, it is worthwhile to learn from him. On the path to the Unitive Way, two conversions are necessary based on the purgation of the senses and the purgation of the spirit. “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart, and with thy whole soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind.” (Luke 10:27) According to Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange in The Three Conversions of the Spiritual Life, this requires loving God for His own sake, not from self-interest or attachments. To love God with your whole mind means that your love is not affected by the ebb and flow of our experiences. This awareness will counteract the feeling of abandonment on the way to Union.

Hermetically, the path through the stages of mediations involves an alchemical transformation of the spirit, soul, and matter. This transformation is summed up by this pattern:

From the state of primordial purity before the Fall
To the state after the Fall
To Reintegration

Hence, there are a series of meditations suggested by Tomberg, that start by meditating on the state of primordial purity, concluding ultimately on the meditation on the Passion. This is the proposed sequence of meditations:

The seven days of creation
The seven stages of the Fall
The seven miracles of St. John’s Gospel
The seven “I am” sayings of Christ
The seven last words of Christ
The seven stages of the passion

The third stage is reached following the understanding of the Passion and then the Resurrection. Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange summarizes the stages, based on the three conversions of the Apostles:

First Conversion: They became disciples of the Master, attracted by the sublime beauty of His teaching.
Second Conversion: This came at the end of the Passion, which had enabled them to divine the fecundity of the mystery of the Cross, enlightened by the Resurrection which followed it;
Third Conversion: It filled them with the profound conviction of this mystery. This resulted in a complete transformation of their souls.

The events of the Passion that are fruitful for meditation are these:

Washing of the feet
The scourging
Crown of thorns
The way of the cross
The crucifixion
The entombment
The resurrection

A more detailed examination of each of these will follow during the week.

Epilog on Love

The Scripture readings for Quinquagesima Sunday illustrate the first and third conversion. The Gospel was about the blind man by the side of the road (Luke 18:31-43) St. Gregory the Great understood this as an allegory about the human race, which was in a state of darkness following the Fall, but then came into the light.

The other text was from 1 Corinthians 13:1-13, the famous sermon on Love, or actually on Charity. Everyone seems today to know what love is, without realizing how difficult it is, what is worth loving, or even how to go about loving. Charity means “love” in the sense of the commandment to love God and your neighbor as yourself. As such, charity is the goal, not the beginning. The gifts of the Holy Spirit lead to Charity. It requires understanding and wisdom to know what to love. It takes strength to love in the face of adversity. Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange sums it up like this:

It is impossible to have a high degree of charity without having at the same time and in a proportionate degree the gifts of understanding and wisdom, gifts which, together with faith, are the principle of the infused contemplation of revealed mysteries.