I asked a friend (and reader of this blog!) for a Jungian presentation of the Tarot as a spiritual system, and he recommended the book Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey into Christian Hermeticism (a posthumously-published work by an anonymous but identified Roman Catholic occultist/scholar). I’ve been reading the book hoping it would make a fun escape from a medieval scholastic commentary on Indian philosophy called the Tattvasamgraha I’ve been too depressed to finish, but I found it to be very much the same genre of literature. I don’t have time to do a proper review at the moment, but I’ve copy/pasted notes to a colleague below. I am disappointed because this book seems to have generated enthusiastic praise from the right kind of people
(Pope John Paul II; Cardinal Hans Urs von Balthasar, the poster-boy of a certain kind of progressive post-Vatican II Catholicism; Fathers Basil Pennington and Thomas Keating, who popularized elements of Buddhist shamatha meditation as centering prayer; Father Bede Griffiths, who founded a Hindu/Christian ashrama; Huston Smith, a notable religious studies scholar and comparativist). Yet while the book is scholarly and learned enough and tries to be theologically-progressive, I was constantly chaffing on the limitations of its method and its dated portrait of Buddhism/Indian religions, and finding its particular Christian take to close more creative doors than it opened.
Comments follow more-or-less unedited (so sorry for any rough edges or repetition of material previously presented):
The book was written in the mid-60s and is learned enough - the anonymous author could find his way through contemporary scholarly literature on yoga, advaita vedanta, Buddhism, Neoplatonism, Hermeticism, Western occultism, 19th/20th century Western philosophy, and Jung well enough to create a complete system of Catholic Christian spiritual meditations on the Major Arcana of the Tarot in a universalist/inclusivist “perennial philosophy” genre in which esoteric Christianity is represented as the fullest manifestation of spiritual wisdom also present to some degree in other religious traditions. The author is far from superficial or uneducated, and the reader is able to bracket a great deal of methodological irritation by reminding himself/herself of what was state-of-the-art scholarship on these traditions at the time the book was written. The book clearly impressed a number of very important Catholics ca. 1980 when it was posthumously published, because it’s blurbed by Basil Pennington (the priest who popularized shamatha meditation as Christian contemplative prayer), Bede Griffiths (of the Hindu/Christian ashrama), and Thomas Keating (a popular Trappist author). It also got a glowing afterword by a highly influential Catholic intellectual and cardinal, Hans Urs von Balthasar.
I fail to understand where all the enthusiasm is coming from. The tone is consistently, gratingly hierarchical and elitist (the author reproduces Neoplatonism’s greatest mistake, the idea that emanations from the ultimate are ordered hierarchically and that you can therefore codify a linear path of spiritual development from lower to higher that will be the same for everyone). The author consistently defers to magisterial and traditional religious authority as divinely revealed and therefore not to be tampered with, and has worked out a strategy of distinguishing between the “true spiritual core” of a tradition and its institutional shadow, which allows him to deflect any criticism of his tradition as relating only to its institutional shadow (or egregore) and not to its spiritual reality. He doesn’t always return the favor and allow the same kind of flip-flop for other religions - he identifies some (”primitive,” that is typically non-Eurasian) traditions with their institutional apparatus or egregore pure and simple, writing them off as spiritual manifestations of arrested and/or pathological psychosocial development. The literature is presented as an initiatory sequence of mysteries in which authority for its own sake is central, and outsiders should be kept in the dark. The author makes an ugly and sharp high magic/low magic distinction (also going back to his Neoplatonic sources - the old distinction between theurgy in which magic is transformational and sacramental and witchcraft in which magic is directed towards instrumental goals). I think this betrays serious class bias, since only the most elite have the luxury to divorce their practice of magic entirely from practical concerns in order to realize this absolute distinction. It also amounts to a kind of slick polemic - my magic, the magic of the right and authorized group of people, is spiritual and good, but everyone else’s magic is mere technical trickery and a manifestation of technological will-to-power rather than spiritual Gelassenheit. (He didn’t claim to have read Heidegger or directly reference him, but the basic Heideggerian opposition between techne and Gelassenheit and critique of modern technological society seems operative in much of his work). In the end, it’s not necessarily that I thought anything the author came up with was wrong or dreadfully uninsightful. It’s just that the implicit spirituality came across as tedious, over-codified, and ideologically-overdetermined - pretty much exactly how I feel reading medieval scholastic commentaries on Indian philosophy like the Tattvasamgraha.
The Christian theology at work seemed fairly broad-mindedly ecumenical and expansive as these things go. This is not a work that would normally be interpreted as narrow or cramped, but I think that it is so -it works in a high scholastic intellectual style pushed out to its furthest apogee (but is still high scholasticism), with the most tolerant and inclusivistic attitude towards other religions you can manage while still being basically a triumphalist.
[...] a comment by the blogger himself, on the book, Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey into Christian [...]