Tag: Vladimir Solovyov

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Bodhisattva Notes 1

Meeting Notes from 9 January 2017
We read from the bottom of page 607 to page 611.

The mission of Hermetism – both in the past and to come – is the union of spirituality and intellectuality.

However, not everyone who has contributed to that work is explicitly a Hermetist. Tomberg provides a short list of such thinkers. It is obviously helpful to study one or more of them, although their spiritual paths differed and the intellectual interests were quite disparate.

  • Vladimir Solovyov: In “Lectures on Divine Humanity”, Solovyov offered an intellectual understanding of the dogmas of Chrisitianity, e.g., the Trinity or the Incarnation. He incorporated ideas from the Kabbalah, Neoplatonism, Boehme, Swedenborg, and the German philosopher Friedrich Schelling. In his lectures, he mentioned the connection between Alexandrian theosophy and Christian doctrine. Spiritually, he was highly influenced by the Divine Sophia, having had several experiences of her presence. Those writings are collected in a book in English titled “Divine Sophia”. Solovyov was highly influential on Tomberg.
  • Nicolas Berdyaev: Berdyaev was another Russian who reconciled his intellectual interests in philosophy with a deep spirituality based on the creativity and freedom of the human spirit.
  • Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: Teilhard was a French Jesuit and paleontologist. In “The Phenomenon of Man”, he created a sweeping vision of evolution of higher and higher layers; from life to thought to the centrality of Christ. He looked for the eventual culmination in God.
  • Carl Jung: Jung was a Swiss psychiatrist, who combined the scientific method of his profession with a gnostic spirituality. His discovery of the archetypes was expanded on by Tomberg.

The guardians of the Hermetic tradition have two tasks:

  • The study and practical application of the heritage of the past
  • Continuous creative effort aiming at the advancement of the work

This spiritual work, on the historical plane, reconciles two opposing notions, described in several ways

  • One source is from above, the other from below
  • The action of continuous revelation and the effort of human consciousness
  • Revelation and humanism
  • Avatars and Buddhas
  • Saints and the righteous

Job, Socrates, and Immanuel Kant are examples of righteous men. Kant, with the discovery and description of the categorical imperative (which Tomberg equates with the notion of Dharma), leads to faith in the nobility of human nature. Tomberg gives us a deeper understanding of the God-Man Jesus Christ. Since He is completely both natures, faith in Jesus Christ should unite both faith in God and faith in man, and love for Jesus Christ unites love of God and love of neighbor.

Jesus Christ, then, unites the Avatar and the Buddha. The corollary of this is that the simplistic notion — popular in some circles — that all “spiritual teachers” including Krishna, Buddha, and Jesus Christ somehow “taught the same thing”. Tomberg, on the other hand, brings out their distinctiveness, while also uniting them.

We discussed the idea of the Avatar and Buddha, particularly why Tomberg chose them as exemplars. The conclusion was that they are not mere ciphers, or placeholders, for his argument. Rather, they bring real revelations to the Hermetist. Hence, we will be making efforts to understand precisely what Krishna (in the Bhagavad Gita) and Buddha taught. And not simply in an intellectual way, but in terms of states of consciousness.

Our task is to be sure to make meditation and prayer part of our daily schedule. Avoid meditations that are based solely on sounds of untranslatable mantras, or those that concentrate on nothing or perhaps just the awareness of breath. Prayer should include both vocal and mental prayer. Also during the day, be sure to awaken yourself several times and observe what you were considering.  In mental prayer we are considering God. Dom Lehodey describes it this way:

The considerations are not a mere speculative study; they are not made in order to learn or to know, but to inflame the heart, and set the will in motion. The mind’s eye is fixed

  • upon some truth in order to believe it
  • upon some virtue in order to love and seek it
  • upon some duty to fulfill it
  • up moral evil to detest and fly from it
  • upon some danger to avoid it

The fruits of mental prayer are these:

Little by little, mental prayer well made

  • will render our faith more lively
  • will strengthen our conviction
  • will penetrate us deeply with the things of God
  • will keep the supernatural always present to our mind.

Then there will be no more forgetfulness, no more sleep

Upcoming schedule: In addition to the text on Bodhisattva, we will bring in supplementary material:

After that, we will do for Lent a series of seven meditation on the Passion of Jesus Christ as described by Tomberg.

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The Elements of Sacred Magic

Once again, Tomberg points out a potential pitfall along the path: vainglory or pride may be involved in the desire to exercise power over one’s neighbor. Hence, the question of the legitimacy about magic must be raised. First, he gives the example of Peter’s curing of the paralytic in Jesus’ name. This is a moral act of sacred magic because it meets three conditions:

  1. The goal is a healing
  2. The means was based on the essence of Jesus Christ
  3. The source was Jesus, not Peter personally

There is yet a fourth factor that distinguishes the cure from a miracle pure and simple, to wit, Peter was necessary as the intermediary. So this thought leads to a deeper meditation on the meaning of the Incarnation. Tomberg refers to Redemption as the supreme act of Divine Magic, but that does not explain why the Incarnation was necessary for that to occur. That is, why did the Logos have to become the Man-God in order to accomplish the Redemption?

After dismissing some other opinions, which is clear enough, Tomberg explains that the Incarnation, as an act of love (recall “magic is the act of love”), requires the perfect union in Love between two distinct and free wills: the divine and the human. This, then, is the key to Sacred Magic. He then makes the remarkable claim that the work of Redemption is comparable only to the creation of the world.

Hence, miracles require two united wills. Miracles are then due to a new power which arises each time the two wills become united. This union then is precisely what Tomberg means by Sacred Magic.

Tomberg offers yet another, simpler definition of magic: the power of the invisible and the spiritual over the visible and the material. Peter’s cure was sacred magic because it did not depend on his will alone but on the union of his will with the divine.

The consequence is to be doubly happy, since sacred magic serves both what is above and what is below. This confers on Sacred Magic its legitimacy.

The Role of Dogma

Tomberg insists that he has no intention to overturn revealed dogmas, but in Hermetic fashion he deepens our understanding of it. For example, in the first two arcana, there are the dogmas of the Holy Spirit, the Virgin, and the New Birth. Here, there are the dogmas of the Incarnation and the Redemption.

Traditionally, Scripture has been understood on four levels: from the literal historical understanding to the mystical understanding. The mystical level does not supersede the literal level, so it is a “both-and”, not an “either-or”. As history, the Incarnation refers to the historical manifestation of the Logos as the God-Man Jesus at a particular time and place. That is known through faith since we can have no personal experience of it.

However, on the mystical level, it refers to the union of the divine and human wills within us, analogous to the Incarnation of the Logos. That is not known through faith, nor from reasoning about it as we would, for example, know Pythagoras’ Theorem. Rather, it is a direct intuitive knowledge, what he calls “gnosis”. The fact that I am writing about this does not mean I possess this knowledge as personal gnosis. As a matter of fact, apart perhaps from some saints, this union is not permanent so we probably do not have a constant sense of gnosis about it. As for the path to achieve that union, Tomberg refers to St. John of the Cross with the three stages: purgative, illuminative, and ultimately unitive.

Considering the high opinion Tomberg had of Vladimir Solovyov (or Soloviev), it is useful to consider what the latter wrote in the Lectures on Divine Humanity. The influence on Tomberg is clear, although Tomberg takes things even deeper. For example, Solovyov mentions the night conversation with Nicodemus in a similar way to Tomberg. His view of the Incarnation is also helpful. The goal of the Incarnation is theosis, or the spiritualization of the material world.

Although he does not use the word “magic”, the intent is the same. The effect of the Redemption is the real regeneration of man, not the satisfaction of some legal tort. The idea of Regeneration is the integral element of Martinism.

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