Valentin Tomberg on “A Special Intervention from Heaven …”

Dear Friends, known and unknown,

I continue to feel need for a time of contemplation, before resuming this weblog “properly”. In the meantime, I will just note I have recently published here a key article for me, foreshadowing certain themes I hope to explore further at this site, including those to do with the Sacred Heart and the legacy of Valentin Tomberg.

And this article was born out of some of the most important experiences of my life, at Paray-le-Monial in France, where the Cult of the Sacred Heart was born.

Here now in this weblog, I would just like to supply a footnote to that piece, in the form of a quote from Tomberg concerning the Sacred Heart and Paray. Paray is not mentioned specifically, but the context and timing given (“second half of the seventeenth century”) make it clear that the author can mean nothing else than the events at Paray-le-Monial.

Now for me personally, this footnote has been astonishing! Indeed my jaw dropped open. Allow me, if you will, to explain. This text is from the final paragraphs – written shortly before the author’s death – of a book variously entitled Covenant of the Heart or Lazarus Come Forth. It is a book less well-known than Tomberg’s Magnum Opus. I had read it several times before I discovered Paray, but not recently to that discovery.

And I had forgot the text below. Completely forgot. Thus it came to me afresh, only after I had many visits to Paray-le-Monial. Thus only after profound and life-changing things had started to happen to me at Paray, did I discover the following text, where my jaw fell open … My jaw fell open, for among other things, these words serve to make so much sense, as to what I had experienced in this most astonishing of places …

There have been (and still are) times in Europe and elsewhere during which for whole nations the life of the soul as such has been (and still is) in grave danger, having been smothered and reduced to a minimum.

This holds not only with respect to the tidal wave of materialism that has flooded across the world in this century, but also for the outpouring of “intellectual enlightenment” during the age of rationalism in the eighteenth century which paved the way for materialism.

At that time the danger facing the human soul was so great that, in order to avert it, a special intervention from heaven proved necessary as a preventive measure.

This took place during the second half of the seventeenth century. It was then that the revelation of the most sacred heart of Jesus occurred.

This led to the cult of devotion to the most sacred heart of Jesus which spread rapidly in Catholic countries and took root there. Devotion to the sacred heart of Jesus was to save the soul of humanity.

For, with the intellectual enlightenment the danger threatening to break in upon human beings was that of the centaur.

Human beings would have been turned into a kind of centaur — a being consisting of head and limbs (intellect and will), but without heart — that is, a “clever beast”.

Devotion to the sacred heart of Jesus had the task of rekindling the heart. Thereby the light, warmth, and life, streaming from the heart of Jesus, was to counteract the will-to-power and the intellect serving this will.

Yes after something like twenty pilgrammages to Paray, these words serve to confirm my experience.

I will say little more for now, except that this website will be very concerned with the ongoing danger of the centaur, intensified will, intensified thinking (of a degraded kind) and no heart … the danger so evident in the modern brutal capitalist, materialist world arising all around us.

And in response to that, this website will – of course – be about the morally enlivening and enobling Cor Jesu Sacratissimum …

From Amazon US:

(For the UK consult our UK Valentin Tomberg page here.)