“What follows is a letter I sent to someone who had written to me about this some time ago.
We should always bear in mind the hermeneutical principle of charity, by which we try to find an orthodox meaning for whatever we read, if possible. I do very much enjoy the works of Roger Buck, Jean Borella, Stratford Caldecott, Wolfgang Smith, et al., but not without critical distance and doctrinal disagreements.
Valentin Tomberg’s Meditations on the Tarot has nothing to do with the popular idea of Tarot cards; instead, he takes the medieval symbolic figures as a point of departure for metaphysical and spiritual reflection (in this way, the book has to be one of the most unfortunately-named books in history). I read it back in college and it drew me closer not only to Our Lord, but also to Catholic Tradition. I know many others for whom it has exercised a similar apostolic function. Indeed, if one reads widely enough in Tomberg, one discovers him to be, rather curiously, an ultramontanist — an aspect of his work I disagree with quite as much as I do with some of his other views!
It goes without saying that Tomberg has his problems — I would seldom recommend his writings, nor would I reach for them at this point in my life, as I have found much better things to read (including Morello, who I think takes the best and develops it in a more orthodox way). Yet Tomberg has played a remarkable role in bringing people to the truth, much as Plato and Aristotle continue to do, or for that matter St. Gregory of Nyssa, Origen, Tertullian, and Clement of Alexandria, although their works all contain errors, even serious ones. As a traditional Catholic, I condemn the same errors as the Church does. However, as a philosopher and a long-time reader of a wide variety of sources, I do find it possible to “steal the gold from the Egyptians” as the Israelites did, which St. Augustine considered to be a model for intellectual life.
The fact that searching for “hermeticism” or “magic” online turns up dismal and dismaying results is hardly surprising; one should not look to the internet for wisdom. (Think about what would happen if one searched for the term “eros,” even though this has an honorable pedigree, from Plato to Benedict XVI!) Morello is harking back to a much older tradition, one that has ancient and medieval roots, and of which Hildegard of Bingen and Albert the Great are authentic exponents, as yet too little known in these aspects.
Finally, regarding the concept of gnosis, I would recommend Borella’s book The Truth of Christian Gnosis, in which Borella profoundly defends the primacy of divine revelation and the specificity of the Christian mystery against the so-called perennialists (e.g., Guenon and Schuon). As he explains, sadly the term “gnosis,” which was perfectly orthodox among the Church Fathers, was hijacked for evil, and has never quite recovered.
God Bless,
Dr. Kwasniewski”