The Art of the Good

<p>Valentin Tomberg was born in St. Petersburg on February 26 1900. Having been baptized a Protestant he entered the Greek Orthodox church shortly before 1933 and in 1945 became a Roman Catholic. In 1938 Tomberg emigrated to the Netherlands and began actively to lecture on Christological topics. At the beginning of 1944 he moved to Cologne where he was awarded the title of Doctor of Law for the dissertation here published in English for the first time. This dissertation marked an important turning-point in Tomberg's life: humanistic studies he had presented during his thirties are now replaced by a strict orientation towards a Platonic model of knowledge and a medieval so-called realism of universals. Tomberg came to regard the modern path <em>away</em> from natural law (founded upon religion) and <em>toward</em> legal positivism (oriented toward power) as a dismantling of the different levels of law (and at the same time a loss of both the <em>idea</em> and <em>ideal</em> of law)-that is as a process of degeneration or fall which he seeks to reverse in the direction of regeneration. He also proposes a new way of organizing the academic study of law in which the higher levels of law would be included and in which access to the <em>idea</em> and the <em>ideal</em> of law would be restored.</p>