13 THEOSOPHY AND THE RELIGIONS

BEFORE RETURNING to the history of Theosophy, there are two further questions which we wish to examine briefly. The first is the attitude of Theosophy toward religions; the second relates to the existence of the oath in the Theosophical Society. As regards the first, we have seen that Mme Blavatsky offered her doctrine as 'the essence and common origin of all the religions,' no doubt because she had borrowed something from each of them. We have also noted that in the 'exoteric section' everyone was admitted without distinction as to their opinions, this being boasted of as proof of unlimited tolerance. In order to demonstrate that 'no member of the Society has the right to force another member to adopt his personal opinions,' Mme Blavatsky cited this passage from the regulations:

It is not lawful for any officer of the Parent Society to express by word or act any hostility to, or preference for, any one section, religious or philosophical, more than another. All have equal right to have the essential features of their religious belief laid before the tribunal of an impartial world. And no officer of the Society in his capacity as officer, has the right to preach his own sectarian views or beliefs to members assembled, except when the meeting consists of his co-religionists. Upon due warning, violation of the rule shall be punished by suspension or expulsion.^[1]

It was this article that some Theosophists later reproached Mrs Besant for having violated by propagating a particular religion of her own invention, to which charge Mr Leadbeater rather peevishly responded that

this policy is the affair of the president and not theirs, that as the president she knew more of the affair from every angle than her critiques, and that she doubtless had excellent reasons of which these members were completely ignorant.^[2]

It seems then that the directors of the Society are above the laws, which are doubtless made only for simple members and subordinate agents; in these conditions it is very doubtful that the loudly proclaimed tolerance is always strictly respected.

Besides, even if one limits oneself to works considered authoritative in the Theosophical Society, one cannot help noticing that impartiality is often lacking. We have already mentioned Mme Blavatsky's avowed enmity toward Christianity, which no doubt was surpassed only by her enmity toward Judaism; moreover, all that displeased her in Christianity she attributed to Jewish origins. It was thus that she wrote:

All the unselfishness of the altruistic teachings of Jesus has become a merely theoretical subject for pulpit oratory; while the precepts of practical selfishness taught in the Mosaic Bible, against which Christ so vainly preached, have become ingrained into the innermost life of Western nations.... Christian but Biblical people prefer the law of Moses to Christ's law of love. They base upon the Old Testament, which panders to all their passions, their laws of conquest, annexation, and tyranny.^[3]

And further:

What is needed is to impress men with the idea that, if the root of mankind is one, then there must also be one truth which finds expression in all the various religions—except in the Jewish, as you do not find it expressed even in the _Kabala_.^[4] It was the hatred for all that can be characterized as 'Judeo-Chris-tian' that led to the understanding, to which we have alluded, between Mme Blavatsky and the orientalist Burnouf.^[5] For both of them, Christianity was worthless because it had been 'Judaized' by St Paul. They were delighted to oppose this alleged deformation to the teachings of Christ, which they presented as an expression of 'aryan philosophy' which they supposed to have been transmitted by Buddhists to the Essenes. Doubtless it is this community of views which made the Theosophists say that 'the brilliant intelligence of Émile Burnouf was carried on its own wings to those heights bor-dering the lofty altitudes from which radiate the teachings of the Masters of the Himalayas.^[6]

But this is not all, and we are now going to see Sinnett, who was always directly inspired by Mme Blavatsky (under the mask of the 'Masters'), attack not only the Jewish religion but all religions in general,^[7] not even sparing 'exoteric' Buddhism:

Nothing can produce more disastrous effects on human progress as regards the destiny of individuals than the very prevalent notion that one religion, followed out in a pious spirit, is as good as another, and that if such and such doctrines are perhaps absurd when you look into them, the great majority of people will never think of their absurdity, but will recite them in a blamelessly devoted attitude of mind.^[8] What is striking about this esoteric doctrine, we read further on, is that it is opposed to the idea of keeping men

in subjection to any priestly system or dogma by terrifying their fancy with the doctrine of a personal judge waiting to try them for more than their lives at their death.^[9]

The idea of a personal God, so hatefully caricaturized in this last passage,^[10] is one of those that has been most often and most ener-getically spurned by the Theosophists, at least during their first period. 'We do not believe at all, said Mme Blavatsky

in such a God [as that of the Christians, of the Bible and of Moses].... We reject the idea of a personal, or an extra-cosmic and anthropomorphic God, who is but the gigantic shadow of man, and not of man at his best, either. The God of theology, we say—and prove it—is a bundle of contradictions and a logical impossibility.^[11]

This is sufficient to settle the value of the assertion so often made by the leaders of the Theosophical Society, that adherents of all religions will not find in the Society’s teachings anything that might offend their beliefs. ‘It does not seek to remove men from their proper religion,’ says Mrs Besant,

but it rather urges them to seek the spiritual food which in the depths of their faith they need. . . . Wherever it reaches, the Society not only attacks the two great enemies of man, superstition and materialism, it propagates peace and good will, establishing a pacifying force in the conflicts of modern civilization.^[12]

We will see later what the ‘esoteric Christianity’ of contemporary Theosophists amounts to; but immediately after the citations we just made, it is well to read this extract from a work of Mr Leadbeater:

In order to facilitate the oversight and direction of the world, the Adepts have divided it into districts, very much as the Church has divided its territory into parishes, with this difference that the districts sometimes include a continent. An Adept presides over each district, as a priest directs his parish. From time to time the Church makes a special effort which is not directed toward the good of a single parish, but to the general well-being; it sends what is called a ‘mission’ to the interior ‘with the aim of rekindling the faith and reawakening enthusiasm in an entire country. The results obtained do not bring any benefit to the missionaries, but contribute to an augmentation of the work of each parish. From certain points of view, the Theosophical Society resembles such a mission, and the natural divisions of the world made by the diverse religions correspond to different parishes. Our Society appears in the middle of each of them, making no effort to turn people away from the religion which they practice, but on the contrary trying to make them understand better and especially to make them live better, often even leading them back to a religion they have abandoned by offering them a more elevated conception of it. In other cases, there are men who though of a religious temperament yet belong to no religion because they have had to content themselves with vague explanations of orthodox doctrine, and who have found in Theosophical teachings an exposition of the truth which has satisfied their reasoning and to which they have been able to subscribe, thanks to its great tolerance.^[13] We have among our members Jains, Parsees, Jews, Mohammedans, and Christians, and none of them has ever heard a word of condemnation of their religion from the mouths of our instructors. On the contrary, in many cases the work of our Society where it has been established has produced a real revival of religion. The reason for this attitude will be easily grasped through the understanding that all religions have their origin in the Confraternity of the White Lodge. In its bosom there exists, unknown to the masses, the real government of the world; and in this government is found the Department of Religious Instruction. The Chief of this Department (that is to say, the ‘Bodhisattva’) has founded all the religions, whether personally or through the intermediary of a disciple, adapting his teaching both to the times and to the people for which it is destined.^[14]

What is new here in relation to the theories of Mme Blavatsky on the origin of the religions is only the intervention of the ‘Bodhisattva’; but one can see that the claims of the Theosophical Society have only been increasing. In this connection we will also mention as a curiosity the multiple initiatives which, according to the same author, the Theosophists indiscriminately attribute to their Adepts: It has been said that several centuries ago the Chiefs of the White Lodge decided that once every hundred years, during the last quarter of the each century, a special effort would be made to help the world in some way. Some of these efforts are easily recognizable. For example, such is the movement imparted by Christian Rosenkreutz^[15] in the fourteenth century, at the same time that Tsong-khapa reformed northern Buddhism.^[16] In Europe, such also was the Renaissance in the arts and letters, and, in the fifteenth century, the invention of printing. In the sixteenth century we have the reforms of Akbar in India; in England, the publication of the works of Lord Bacon, with the splendid flowering of the reign of Elizabeth; in the seventeenth century, the foundation of the Royal Society of Sciences in England and the scientific works of Robert Boyle^[17] and others after the Restoration. In the eighteenth century there was an effort to implement a very important movement (whose occult history on higher planes is known only to a small number), which unfortunately escaped the control of its leaders and ended in the French Revolution. Finally, we arrive in the nineteenth century at the founding of the Theosophical Society.^[18]

Here, certainly, is a prime specimen of history shaped to the special conceptions of the Theosophists. How many men without in the least suspecting it have been agents of the 'Great White Lodge'! If there were nothing but fantasies such as these, one could merely smile, for they are all too obviously intended to impress the naive and they do not actually have too great an importance. What is much more important, as what follows will show, is how the Theosophists mean to carry out their role as 'missionaries, particularly in the 'district' which corresponds to the domain of Christianity.