Theos-Talk Archives (September 2005 Message tt00012)

As Madame Blavatsky's writings have generated discussion on this list 
recently, perhaps it would be useful, particularly for the sake of 
those who are not conversant with her writings, to review what she 
wrote about dogma and orthodoxy. When one reads about her life and her 
personality it becomes difficult to entertain the notion that she would 
ever have accepted the view that her works are either the final word on 
Theosophy or an authority that can never be examined critically. (PO)


"Dogma and authority have ever been the curse of humanity, the great 
extinguishers of light and truth." (H. P. Blavatsky Collected Writings, 
XIV, p. 117)

"Dogma? Faith? These are the right and left pillars of every soul-
crushing theology. Theosophists have no dogmas, exact no blind faith." 
(BCW, I, 304)

"But what are really culture and civilization? Dickens' idea that our 
hearts have benefited as much by macadam as our boots, is more original 
from a literary, than an aphoristical, standpoint. It is not true in 
principle, and it is disproved in nature by the very fact that there 
are far more good-hearted and noble-minded men and women in muddy 
country villages than there are in macadamised Paris or London. Real 
culture is spiritual. It proceeds from within outwards, and unless a 
person is naturally noble-minded and strives to progress on the 
spiritual before he does so on the physical or outward plane, such 
culture and civilization will be no better than whitened sepulchres 
full of dead men's bones and decay. And how can there be any true 
spiritual and intellectual culture when dogmatic creeds are the State 
religion and enforced under the penalty of the opprobrium of large 
communities of "believers." No dogmatic creed can be progressive. 
Unless a dogma is the expression of a universal and proven fact in 
nature, it is no better than mental and intellectual slavery. One who 
accepts dogmas easily ends by becoming a dogmatist himself. And, as 
Watts has well said: "A dogmatical spirit inclines a man to be 
censorious of his neighbors. . . . . He is tempted to disdain his 
correspondents as men of low and dark understandings because they do 
not believe what he does."" (BCW, XII, 272)

"Student.—Admitting all you say, are not we, as Theosophists, to 
welcome every discovery of truth in any field, especially such truth as 
lessens suffering or enlarges the moral sense? 

Sage.—That is our duty. All truths discovered must be parts of the one 
Absolute Truth, and so much added to the sum of our outer knowledge. 
There will always be a large number of men who seek for these parts of 
truth, and others who try to alleviate present human misery. They each 
do a great and appointed work that no true Theosophist should ignore. 
And it is also the duty of the latter to make similar efforts when 
possible, for Theosophy is a dead thing if it is not turned into the 
life. At the same time, no one of us may be the judge of just how much 
or how little our brother is doing in that direction. If he does all 
that he can and knows how to do, he does his whole present duty." (BCW, 
IX, 103)

"* With the exception of a few agnostics, all the Fellows of the outer 
(exoteric) section of the Theosophical Society, continue to profess the 
respective religion in which they were born, remaining in it and 
following its dogmas and rituals, just as they did before 
becoming "Theosophists." Acquainted with our Society as he has been for 
many years, Mr. Solovyov should also know that "Theosophy" is not "a 
religion without definite dogmas," as he expresses it, but is a 
universal system of philosophy, absolutely without any man-made dogmas. 
Therefore, the Society, as such, remains in its collective whole 
without participation in the dogmas of any religion, but respects both 
the beliefs and rites pertaining to the faith of each one of its 
members, belonging as they do to various religious creeds." (BCW, XII, 
341, footnote)

"Theosophy, and the rules of its Society if not the embodiment and 
practical demonstration of the widest tolerance and of the broadest 
Catholicity would be but a farce. Freethought, which in the views of 
the lexicographers is only unbelief "which discards revelation" 
and "undue boldness of speculation" according to Berkeley, is, in the 
rules of our Society, a sine qua non of true theosophy which being 
liberty of thought untrammelled searches for and accepts truth, and 
nothing but the truth, sacred to every lover of Wisdom. Hence, while 
laughing at this absurdly sudden change of front, evanescent as it is, 
on the part of several of our Christian contemporaries in our favour, 
we cannot but feel at the same time, indignant at the strenuous though 
fruitless attempts made by the Light of the World to use us, 
Theosophists, as convenient weapons in its warfare against (if not 
altogether for "the cure of") Infidelity. It would fain profit by the 
darkness thrown over the heathen word "theosophy" through the fanciful 
etymology it has been given in the Dictionaries compiled by 
monotheistic lexicographers, and use the term now, as a sledge-hammer 
to break the heads of Secularism and Freethought. Against this we 
protest. We may not be in sympathy with materialism, and may even abhor 
it; yet the Theosophical Society ought never to forget that which it 
owes to Freethinkers. It is to the unceasing efforts of a long series 
of adherents to Freethought—almost every one of whom has been made a 
martyr to his convictions at the hands of bigotry—that we, in the 
present century, owe the very possibility of our existence as an 
organized body. And the fact that none of us has been or can be now 
roasted alive in Trafalgar Square—to the greater glory of that God to 
belief in whom Annie Besant is now alleged to have been converted—is 
due to the long battle of Freethought against Superstition and dark 
fanaticism." (BCW, XI, 410)

"In its capacity of an abstract body, the Society [the TS] does not 
believe in anything, does not accept anything, and does not teach 
anything." (BCW, XI, 124)

"Orthodoxy in Theosophy is a thing neither possible nor desirable. It 
is diversity of opinion, within certain limits, that keeps the 
Theosophical Society a living and a healthy body, its many other ugly 
features notwithstanding. Were it not, also, for the existence of a 
large amount of uncertainty in the minds of students of Theosophy, such 
healthy divergencies would be impossible, and the Society would 
degenerate into a sect, in which a narrow and stereotyped creed would 
take the place of the living and breathing spirit of Truth and an ever 
growing Knowledge." (BCW, IX, 243-244)

"Every such attempt as the Theosophical Society has hitherto ended in 
failure, because, sooner or later, it has degenerated into a sect, set 
up hard-and-fast dogmas of its own, and so lost by imperceptible 
degrees that vitality which living truth alone can impart. You must 
remember that all our members have been bred and born in some creed or 
religion, that all are more or less of their generation both physically 
and mentally, and consequently that their judgment is but too likely to 
be warped and unconsciously biassed by some or all of these influences. 
If, then, they cannot be freed from such inherent bias, or at least 
taught to recognise it instantly and so avoid being led away by it, the 
result can only be that the Society will drift off on to some sandbank 
of thought or another, and there remain a stranded carcass to moulder 
and die." (The Key to Theosophy, Conclusion)