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Abstract
This essay examines the intellectual coherence of Annie
Besant's life in such a way as to explore the rise of New
Age thought in its relation to the Victorian crisis of faith.
Scholars typically present Besant's life in terms of a series
of commitments to incompatible movements, notably secularism,
socialism, and theosophy. They explain her involvement in
these movements by reference to her emotional needs, not
to beliefs she held for reasons that made sense to her.
In contrast, this essay suggests her life was a quest for
truth, where the requirements she placed on the truth arose
from her early break with Christianity, and where her social
situation placed constraints on the sorts of movements through
which she might pursue her quest. From this perspective,
New Age thought appears as an intelligible response to the
same crisis of faith that underlay much Victorian secularism.
Annie Besant's Quest for Truth:
Christianity, Secularism, and New Age Thought
Annie Besant was arguably the most famous, or rather infamous,
woman of her age.* For much of the 1870s and 1880s, she
promoted the secularist cause with remarkable vigour. She
became a vice-president of the National Secular Society,
the members of which thought almost as highly of her as
they did of Charles Bradlaugh, the president. In 1889, however,
she joined the Theosophical Society in a sensational move
that shocked even her closest friends. Eventually she became
president of the Theosophical Society, the members of which
again revered her almost as much as they did its prophet,
Madame Blavatsky. Besant moved from the materialist atheism
of the secularists to the New Age thought of the theosophists.
All of her previous biographers have emphasised the contrast
between these two sets of beliefs. They have been unable
to recover any coherence in her activities within the secularist,
Fabian, and theosophical movements. Indeed, they have spoken
of her many lives, as though she wandered aimlessly, if
enthusiastically, from cause to cause with no guiding theme
whatsoever. When they do look for a pattern in her life,
they typically turn not to her reasons for doing what she
did, but rather to her hidden needs, such as to follow a
dominant man or to exercise her powers. They turn to her
emotional make-up to explain her final flight from reason,
and they then explain her earlier commitments by reference
to the emotions they have uncovered. In contrast, I hope
to represent Besant's life as a reasoned quest for truth
in the context of the Victorian crisis of faith and the
social concerns it helped to raise. Besant, with her secularism,
Fabianism, and theosophy, was very much of her time, for
whilst the early part of Queen Victoria's reign was shaped
by a religious movement to make Britain a truly Christian
nation and a political movement to make Britain a democratic
nation, the later part of her reign took its shape from
the need to find both a faith capable of surviving the rationalist
onslaught and solutions to the social problems an extended
franchise had failed to solve.
To reinterpret Besant in this way is not only to rescue
her from the condescension of posterity, but also to point
to more general arguments about the history of New Age thought.
The New Age movement is characterised by things such as
a holistic worldview, a fascination with eastern and folk
spirituality, an interest in natural magic, including alternative
medicine, and a concern to devise new ways of living together.
Most scholars correctly see the New Age movement as a modern
form of occultism inspired above all by theosophy. The Theosophical
Society transformed the occult tradition in a way that has
inspired a wide variety of New Age figures and groups. It
has inspired Celtic occultists and authors such as W. B.
Yeats; through one of its offshoots, the Krishnamurti movement,
it has inspired authors and New Age thinkers such as Aldous
Huxley; and through another of its offshoots, Rudolph Steiner's
Anthroposophical Society, it has inspired New Age thinkers
and activists such as Sir George Trevelyan. The Theosophical
Society stands behind much of what we now consider to be
the New Age movement. Thus, one way of exploring historical
questions about the nature of the New Age movement is by
looking at theosophy. Certainly I want to use a reinterpretation
of Besant to cast light on the rise of the New Age movement
in relation to the Victorian crisis of faith. Of course,
no intellectual biography can do justice to the way vast
social transformations, such as industrialisation and urbanization,
affected the changing structure of religious belief in Victorian
Britain. Nonetheless, my interest lies in the emergence
of New Age thought as a problem in the history of ideas.
What reasons did people have for coming to believe in occult
forces and eastern spirituality? How do the reasons they
had for doing so relate to the reasons they had for turning
away from Christian beliefs? To tackle these questions,
we have to use intellectual biography; we have to explore
the ways in which people came to accept New Age ideas; we
have to understand how their reasoning, shaped by their
social and cultural contexts, made New Age ideas seem compelling
to them. We can begin to understand the place of New Age
thought in history, therefore, by asking why Besant turned
from secularism to theosophy, and how her reasons for doing
so relate to the reasons she earlier had for turning from
Christianity to secularism.
To investigate the place of New Age thought in the history
of ideas is to raise important issues about the nature of
rationality. Historians often dismiss the whole occult tradition,
and especially its recent manifestations, as a flight from
reason. Inspired by Enlightenment assumptions, they suggest
once modern science arose it constituted the seat of human
reason, so forms of thinking clearly opposed to science
should be dismissed as flights of fancy. The Enlightenment
belief in an objective rationality has led historians to
approach modern occultism as if it had to be a product of
charlatans, irrational emotions, and the like. Nowadays,
however, philosophers and historians alike are increasingly
sceptical of the idea of objective rationality. In particular,
many scholars now stress that because we can not have pure
perceptions, and because the meaning of our terms depend
on one another, therefore what we would count as confirmation
of any given proposition must vary with our other beliefs.
Thus, what it is rational for one to believe must depend
on one's intellectual commitments and the problems one sets
oneself. There is no body of objectively valid theories
everyone must accept at a given historical juncture if they
are to be considered rational. Rather, there always are
a number of competing bodies of theories each of which can
be held rationally, and a decision between which can be
made at best only with hindsight in the light of their later
development. Nonetheless, to renounce objective rationality
as a tool of historical interpretation is not also to renounce
a weaker, subjective or contextual rationality. On the contrary,
even critics of objective rationality typically argue that
a concern with consistency, a concern to organise one's
beliefs in accord with one's own notion of best belief,
is a necessary feature of all bodies of belief. Thus, historians
can begin to explain why people change their beliefs in
the ways they do by showing how their doing so made sense
in the context of the other beliefs they held and the particular
problems they set themselves. Perhaps, therefore, historians
should begin to approach modern occultism not as a flight
from an objective reason, but as a reasonable response to
a particular social and cultural context. We can begin to
do this by presenting Besant's life as a coherent quest
for truth in the context of a particular set of problems
and commitments.
If we are to study Besant to point to a more general view
of the rise of the New Age movement in relation to Christianity
and secularism, we must consider how typical she was. On
the one hand, the unique nature of her quest for truth is
what makes her of such interest. Because she played such
a prominent role in not only the National Secular Society
but also the Theosophical Society, she provides us with
a single life in which we have a clear example of the two
historical processes we are concerned with, namely, secularisation
and the rise of New Age thought. Her life embodies the relationship
between secularism and theosophy. On the other hand, we
can use her life to point to more general conclusions only
because in many ways she was true to type. The reasons she
had for renouncing Christianity for secularism and then
for turning to theosophy are fairly typical of contemporary
secularists and theosophists. Here I will suggest the basic
dilemmas she faced were those at the heart of the Victorian
crisis of faith, and, in addition, I will refer throughout
to other people who were attracted to the movements she
was and for reasons similar to hers.
In what follows, therefore, I want to bring out the continuities
in Besant's varied intellectual commitments in a way that
casts light on the relationship of secularism and New Age
thought as contrasting responses to the Victorian crisis
of faith. To begin, I will look at her personal crisis of
faith and how it set up the particular body of intellectual
commitments and questions that dominated the rest of her
life. Next I will consider how her social and cultural location
pushed her towards certain types of organisations among
those which might have enabled her to respect these commitments
and answer these questions. Then I will show her secularism,
Fabianism, and theosophy all constituted ways of coping
with the commitments and questions she took out of her crisis
of faith. The unity of her life lay, therefore, not in the
need for a man or a higher egoism, nor in any other emotional
drive, but rather in a stable set of intellectual commitments
and questions. Her life suggests we should see the New Age
movement not as an emotional abdication of reason, but as
a reasonable response to the same crisis of faith that inspired
much Victorian secularism.
The Dilemmas Posed
Annie Besant (nee Wood) was born in 1847 to a largely Irish
and entirely middle-class family then living in London.
Her father remained something of a religious sceptic, while
her mother moved from evangelicalism to theological liberalism,
slowly rejecting doctrines such as Biblical infallibility,
eternal damnation, vicarious atonement, and the equality
of the Son with the Father in the Trinity. Annie herself
had a rigorous evangelical upbringing under the watchful
eye of Miss Marryat, a spinster with whom she lived following
the death of her father in 1852. Miss Marryat allowed no
books on Sundays other than the Bible and Sunday at Home,
and her charges soon learnt the theatre was a devilish thing.
Annie absorbed the religious spirit of the house, freely
determining never to go to a dance even if someone invited
her to do so. Later she recalled how 'the strong and intense
Evangelicalism of Miss Marryat coloured the whole of my
early religious thought'. Nonetheless, she thoroughly enjoyed
the ritualism, incense, and pomp of Roman Catholicism, all
of which she witnessed when visiting Paris in 1862. Indeed,
soon after leaving Miss Marryat, she turned to Anglo-Catholic
ideas and practices, poring over the works of the Church
Fathers, having Keble replace Milton as her favourite writer,
beginning to fast regularly, and even flagellating herself
to see whether or not she could withstand the pain she might
have to face if she ever were called upon to be martyred,
a fate for which she yearned.
Annie first tasted the forbidden fruit of doubt while passing
through her High Church phase. She set out to throw her
mind back to the original events of Holy Week in order to
relive them for herself. To aid her efforts, she tried to
produce a single table of happenings out of the four gospels.
Imagine her horror when she discovered, as many had before
her, that the gospels contained disparities, that the gospels
could not be harmonised. After a brief time of confusion,
she quelled her doubts by telling herself God had placed
inconsistencies in the gospels as a test of faith. She settled
down to her old life of sacrifice to, and service of, Christ.
'To serve Him through His Church became more and more a
definite ideal in my life, and my thoughts began to turn
towards some kind of "religious life", in which
I might prove my love by sacrifice and turn my passionate
gratitude into active service.' With these thoughts, she
drifted into marriage with Frank Besant, an evangelical
clergyman then working as a school teacher. She hardly knew
the man, disliked the thought of leaving her mother, and
became engaged partly as a result of a confusion. However,
she went through with the marriage because she thought priests
verged on the divine, and marrying one would enable her
to devote herself more fully to Church and poor. Mutual
sexual ignorance and her husband's domineering character
ensured their marriage was not a success. Besant, however,
doted on their two children. Then, in 1871, the younger
child fell violently ill and Besant herself collapsed in
exhaustion after she had nursed the child back to health.
Her collapse was mental as well as physical. An unhappy
marriage had set her thinking about suffering in the world,
and her daughter's agony had reinforced her puzzlement.
How, she wondered, could a merciful God allow such pain?
Her struggle with doubt lasted just over three years and
nearly cost her her life through both illness and suicide.
No other time in her much varied life was of such importance.
'It was a hell to live through,' she later recalled:
No one who has not felt it knows the fearful anguish inflicted
by doubt on the earnestly religious soul. There is in life
no other pain so horrible, so keen in its torture, so crushing
in its weight. It seems to shipwreck everything, to destroy
the one steady gleam of happiness 'on the other side' that
no earthly storm could obscure; to make all life gloomy
with a horror of despair, a darkness that verily may be
felt. Nothing but an imperious intellectual and moral necessity
can drive into doubt a religious mind, for it is as though
an earthquake shook the foundations of the soul, and the
very being quivers and sways under the shock. No life in
the empty sky; no gleam in the blackness of the night, no
voice to break the deadly silence; no hand outstretched
to save. Empty-brained triflers who have never tried to
think, who take their creed as they take their fashions,
speak of Atheism as the outcome of foul life and vicious
desires. In their shallow heartlessness and shallower thought
they cannot even dimly imagine the anguish of entering the
mere penumbra of the Eclipse of Faith, much less the horror
of that great darkness in which the orphaned soul cries
out into the infinite emptiness: 'Is it a Devil that has
made the world? Is the echo, "Children, ye have no
Father," true? Is it all blind chance, is all the clash
of unconscious forces, or are we the sentient toys of an
Almighty Power that sports with our agony, whose peals of
awful mockery of laughter ring back answers to the wailings
of our despair?' She would spend the rest of her life looking
for answers to the questions raised by her doubts.
Besant discussed her doubts with a liberal cleric, a friend
of her husband's, who suggested she read F. D. Maurice and
even J. S. Mill while also assuring her that Biblical references
to hell-fire were purely symbolic. Soon she determined that
never again would she say 'I believe' unless she had proved
to herself the truth of what she affirmed. She decided to
look at various Christian dogmas to see if they were demonstrably
true. The four dogmas upon which she focused embodied the
eye of the storm of Victorian doubt. They were the idea
of eternal damnation and eternal punishment; the nature
of goodness, and whether or not one could reconcile the
idea of a good and loving God with the sin and misery found
here on earth; the morality of the atonement and the associated
idea of vicarious suffering; and whether or not the holy
scriptures were inspired, and if so then in what sense.
As she explored these issues, so she left behind even the
liberal Christianity of her husband's friend.
We can unpack Besant's doubts in terms of the questions
she asked and the sorts of answers she required. Her most
basic question concerned the inspiration of the Bible. She
recalled her attempt to harmonise the gospels and questioned
their historical veracity. She read Renan's study of the
historical life of Jesus followed by several more academic
works of historical criticism, most of which suggested the
Bible did not offer a record of events as seen by eye-witnesses.
Furthermore, she took a keen interest in recent scientific
discoveries, including the theory of evolution, which clearly
contradicted several Biblical doctrines. Later she recalled
how 'Darwin had done much towards freeing me from my old
bonds.'
Her reasons for questioning the truth of the Bible pointed
towards certain requirements for an adequate account of
the physical nature of the universe. In general, because
she rejected Christianity as untrue, she saw her life as
a quest for Truth. The Bible could not act as an authoritative
guide to human understanding, so an abstract concept of
truth stepped in to fill the breach. We are so used today
to judge opinions or theories as right or wrong according
to their relationship to various abstract concepts of truth
that we might not appreciate the nature and significance
of this change. When Besant ceased to judge her beliefs
in terms of revealed religion, she elevated truth into an
almost religious ideal to be put before all other considerations.
Thus, when people later attacked her atheism as negative,
she replied that humans should live in accord with truth,
not superstition: 'it is an error,' she explained, 'to regard
my truth as negative and barren, for all truth is positive
and fruitful'. Truth provided an ideal by which to live
one's life. She even wanted her tomb to bear the epitaph
'She Tried To Follow Truth.' More particularly, an account
of the physical nature of the universe could not be considered
true unless it were compatible with modern science and especially
a theory of evolution. She had rejected Christianity because
the supernatural revelations of the Bible did not accord
with the empirical discoveries of the natural and human
sciences. From now on, she would accept only natural accounts
of the universe. Supernatural explanations were unacceptable.
Besant did not suffer from scientific doubts alone. Her
concerns were also moral. Here she strove to reconcile theological
doctrines such as vicarious atonement and eternal punishment
with what she took to be the necessary characteristics of
a world made by a just and loving God. She believed the
dogma of the atonement contained vital moral truths: the
life of Christ revealed both an impulse to self-sacrifice
and the willingness of the strong to help the weak. Yet
the moral core of the dogma was surrounded by rotten, immoral
pulp. The very idea that we needed to atone for our sins
implied God was sufficiently vengeful and cruel to require
us to pay Him off with pain and anguish. Besides, she could
think of no moral grounds on which God could hold us to
blame for our sins when we were only what He had made us.
And anyway, the vicarious nature of Christ's atonement vitiated
any moral content in the sacrifice since there was no justice
when 'the person sacrificed is not even the guilty party'.
The doctrine of eternal punishment was worse still; it lacked
even a core of moral truth; it was 'thoroughly and essentially
bad'. Besant revolted against the idea that individuals
could spend eternity suffering for finite sins with neither
a chance to repent nor any prospect of their situation improving
no matter how righteous or moral they might become. Once
again, God could not be as vengeful and cruel as the Bible
suggested. Besant's final moral qualm centred on the old
problem of a loving and omnipotent God overlooking an evil
world. Together these considerations led her to conclude
Christianity was false. One Christian doctrine - the belief
in a moral God - contradicted not only other Christian doctrines
- the vicarious atonement and eternal damnation - but also
observable fact - the existence of evil.
The moral doubts from which Besant suffered established
definite criteria for an adequate theory of the moral nature
of the universe. In general, she picked up the typical Victorian
concern with preserving morality in a secularised society,
and the associated humanitarian concern with social duty.
As a child, she had looked on the poor as people in need
of education and charity but little more. Now her loss of
faith changed her attitude. She became more concerned to
foster our sense of social duty and more humanitarian in
her understanding of our social duty. The 'keynote' of her
life became a 'longing for sacrifice to something felt as
greater than the self', and this something was defined by
an ethical positivism which opened her ears 'to the wailings
of the great orphan humanity'. More particularly, she wanted
to be able to declare: 'I believe that God is light, and
in Him is no darkness at all; I believe that all mankind
is safe, cradled in the everlasting arms.' Her denunciation
of the atonement indicated a moral universe would be one
in which people ultimately got what they deserved. Her rejection
of eternal punishment implied that a moral universe would
hold out the possibility of vanquishing evil. And her qualms
about the compatibility of a loving God and the existence
of evil pointed to the need for a natural, not a supernatural,
explanation of the moral state of the universe, an explanation
demonstrating the natural necessity of evil, rather than
portraying evil as something allowed by an omnipotent God.
The experience of doubt set up various themes that then
gave continuity to Besant's multifarious activities. With
respect to the physical nature of the universe, these themes
were, first, a somewhat mystical concern with truth, and,
second, an insistence on natural explanations incorporating
current scientific knowledge. With respect to the moral
nature of the universe, these themes were, first, a concern
with social duty within a humanitarian context, and, second,
an insistence on a natural account of a just order in which
everyone receives what they deserve and from which we can
eliminate evil. These themes run through the whole of the
rest of her life.
Social and Cultural Pressures
Religious enthusiasm, evangelical leanings, and a concern
with duty and sacrifice provided the intellectual diet of
many a Victorian childhood. As T. H. Green recognised, his
contemporaries' sense of personal identity derived largely
from their religious beliefs: 'when the old questions about
God, freedom, and immortality are being put by each man
to himself in the direct and popular form which they have
now assumed, as questions bearing upon his own life, it
is idle to deny that he is a different man according to
the answer which he gives to them'. Religious issues mattered.
The Victorians discussed theological niceties with real
passion. What is more, the Christianity of the early Victorian
era was dominated by Biblical literalism and atonement theology.
Indeed, the most interesting feature of Besant's attempt
to harmonise the gospels is not, as she later implied, the
anticipation of her future secularism, so much as the indication
of her belief in the absolute truth of the Bible. Only someone
who assumed the gospels were perfectly historically accurate
would expect them to be perfectly compatible. Such Biblical
literalism, typical of many Victorians, soon faced an onslaught
from geology, historical criticism and evolutionary theory.
Similarly, the most interesting feature of Besant's moral
revulsion against Christianity is not, as she later implied,
the anticipation of her future theosophical ethic, so much
as the indication of her commitment to atonement theology.
Only someone who stressed the need to atone for sin over
the sanctification of life could find Christian morality
so bleak. Such an atonement theology, again typical of many
Victorians, soon faced an onslaught from a new moral conscience.
The whole Victorian crisis of faith resembled Besant's in
that it arose not from attacks on all possible forms of
Christianity but rather from a series of challenges to Biblical
literalism and atonement theology.
So, although Besant's descent into doubt paralleled a transformation
in her personal life, her intellectual struggle resembles
that of many of her contemporaries. Cultural developments
- the rise of modern science, historical scholarship, and
a new moral conscience - put pressure on Victorian religion.
Although numerous Victorians experienced much the same crisis
of faith as did Besant, they reacted to it in various different
ways. Some of them responded by developing new forms of
Christianity, less tied to Biblical literalism and the Atonement
than had been those that dominated the early part of Victoria's
reign. Some, such as the Lux Mundi group, turned to an immanentist
theology emphasising the Incarnation; others, particularly
Broad Church men, looked to the moral example provided by
the life of Jesus the man; others, such as Anna Kingsford
and Edward Maitland, preached a form of Christian mysticism,
to which they added a belief in reincarnation; and yet others,
such as John Kenworthy, accepted the Christian anarchism
of Tolstoy. Other people responded by rejecting Christianity
as untenable, and turning instead to another form of spirituality,
or even to an atheistic materialism. Some, such as Richard
Congreve, turned to a full-blown Comtean positivism complete
with its own liturgies; others, such as William Jupp, adopted
a loose, romantic pantheism inspired by Emerson and by Wordsworth;
others, such as Green himself, developed a form of philosophical
idealism; others, such as John Trevor, formed the Labour
Church movement to bring together religious faith and the
working-class; and yet others, such as the members of the
Society for the Study of Psychical Research, tried to use
scientific experiments to assess the validity of spiritualist
phenomena. All sorts of people responded to the Victorian
crisis of faith in all sorts of ways.
In order to understand why Besant made the choices she
did, why she responded to the general Victorian crisis of
faith in some ways and not others, we need to explore the
social and cultural pressures working upon her. Her particular
situation shaped the choices she made by more or less closing
off some options and by opening up others. Arguably the
most important influence on her choices was the evangelical
temper in which she had been raised. Victorian culture as
a whole was dominated by evangelical notions of truth and
duty; a meaningful order of things defined one's own purpose
and responsibilities. As Besant turned away from Christianity,
so she clung all the more tenaciously to these notions.
Her upbringing, and the general culture of her times, committed
her to a modernist faith in fixed meanings. There was little
likelihood of her seriously contemplating, let alone accepting,
the sort of truthless, arguably amoral, universe since made
familiar by Nietzsche. More particularly, the evangelical
temper continued to influence her adherence to a truth defined
as the purpose to which she should sacrifice her life. The
meaning of things imposed upon us a rigorous duty, verging
on complete self-denial for the sake of others. Here too
Besant surely exemplifies the whole Victorian crisis of
faith. No matter how people responded to the contemporary
challenges to Biblical literalism and atonement theology,
they nearly always did so in ways that gave a central place
to concepts such as truth and sacrifice. Indeed, the ubiquity
and strength among Victorians of a belief in a meaningful
order imposing a stringent duty on the individual constitutes
a crucial part of what divides them from us. Their commitment
to a Truth requiring Sacrifice constitutes a crucial part
of what makes them other than us.
It is precisely because a commitment to Truth and Duty
characterised almost all of the religious and social movements
of Victorian Britain that we can not appeal to it to explain
why Besant ended up in the movements she did. To explain
this we must look at more specific influences upon her.
First, however, I should make it clear I do not think social
and cultural influences can explain anyone's decisions fully.
They can help us to understand why someone was likely to
make a particular decision, but they can not explain every
detail of the decision, and not everyone who is subject
to them need make that particular decision. Thus, George
Eliot had a crisis of faith under similar influences to
Besant, and yet she made somewhat different decisions. The
fact is social and cultural influences are only influences;
they are not determining or decisive causes. That said,
one influence more specific to Besant was her social background.
On the one hand, she came from the educated and leisured
class that provided the theorists and critics of Victorian
Society. Her father studied at Trinity College, Dublin,
and worked as a doctor, until the Irish Famine of 1845 saw
him leave for London where he became an underwriter. Even
after her father's death, her mother made a comfortable
living keeping house for boys at Harrow, where the Woods
were accepted into the society of the headmaster Dr Vaughan
and his wife. Annie's brother went to Cambridge, and the
education Annie herself received from Miss Marryat was excellent
for the time. She always placed great stress on the intellect
- her ideal of a universal brotherhood always gave a special
place to an intellectual elite. This made it unlikely she
would find anti-theoretical movements congenial. On the
other hand, Besant was a woman, and this simple fact debarred
her from the traditional centres of intellectual life in
Britain. When, in 1878, she began to study in an attempt
to enrol on a degree course at London University, it was
only a year after the University had become the first to
agree to admit women, and by then she already had become
a famous agitator. Besant's lack of formal education - she
did not sit a public examination until 1879 - effectively
excluded her from highly intellectual groups such as the
Lux Mundi theologians and the Oxford Idealists. Her niche
almost certainly had to be as a populariser and propagandist
rather than as a philosopher or scientist. The movements
most in accord with Besant's background were, therefore,
those that used an accessible theory as a basis for agitation.
Another influence on the choices Besant made was the way
she already seemed to be being driven out of conventional
society. Her doubts expressed themselves in public gestures
of opposition to mainstream Christianity. She wrote sceptical
pamphlets with titles such as 'On the Deity of Jesus of
Nazareth', and although she published them anonymously so
as not to embarrass her husband, they were declared to be
by the wife of a 'Beneficed Clergyman'. At home, she reached
a compromise with her husband whereby she would participate
in services directed towards God himself, but not Holy Communion,
which presupposed a belief in both Christ and the doctrine
of atonement. Inevitably people noticed such changes in
her behaviour, and equally inevitably, their comments, when
made public, embarrassed her husband professionally. Consequently,
about a year later, in 1873, he gave her an ultimatum: either
she took communion again or she left his household. She
left him. The marriage had never been a good one, and her
loss of faith effectively destroyed it. The problem here
was that Besant had put herself in opposition to the two
pillars of Victorian society, namely, religion and the family.
The Victorians thought social order, morality itself, depended
on good habits defined by the church and enforced through
the family. Besant's life challenged everything they believed
in. Middle-class women were restricted by and large to the
roles of obedient daughter, wife, and mother. In rejecting
these roles, Besant lost her position in society. She repudiated
her husband, when middle-class women did not do such things.
She had to make her own living and appear for herself in
public, when middle-class women did not do such things.
Already she had embarked on the way of life that would end
with the Master of the Rolls saying, 'one cannot expect
modest women to associate with her'. Besant almost certainly
had to find a place for herself in alternative, even bohemian,
religious and social movements. The movements most likely
to accept her were those that promoted new ways of living,
and especially those that encouraged women to experiment
with new social roles.
Secularism
In 1872, Besant attended a meeting of liberal Christians
in St. George's Hall presided over by Charles Voysey. Afterwards
she bought some tracts that were on sale in the ante-room,
and so began to read works by Voysey and prominent Unitarians
such as the American preacher William Channing. No doubt
she liked what she found; after all, Voysey did not just
maintain the Bible could not be a divine revelation, he
also condemned the doctrines of original sin, eternal punishment,
and vicarious Atonement, as cruel and immoral. He expressed
just the qualms she had felt. These liberal Christians even
led her to question the divinity of Christ. She had rejected
the atonement as incompatible with a moral God, and without
this dogma she could see no reason for continuing to believe
in Christ as the son of God. If there was no need for a
sinless man to atone for the sins of humanity, there was
no need for God to become incarnate. Thus the whole edifice
of Christianity collapsed. Besant now began to think of
herself as a theist. Soon afterwards, the Voyseys invited
her to their home, where she met Thomas Scott, who held
court over a number of religious liberals, including Charles
Bray, Bishop Colenso, and Sarah Hennell. After she had left
her husband, it was one of these religious liberals, Moncure
Conway, a theistic preacher at the South Place Ethical Society,
who invited her to stay with his family until she could
make alternative arrangements.
Besant had entered the world of religious liberals, a world
of Unitarians, theists, and members of ethical societies.
Her theism met the requirements implicit in her reasons
for rejecting Christianity. Like many other late Victorians,
Besant had come to believe in an immanent God. She said
'God is slowly revealing Himself by His works, by the course
of events, by the progress of Humanity: if He has never
spoken from Heaven in human language, He is daily speaking
in the world around us.' Her new God revealed himself through
nature in a way that did not require reference to either
the supernatural or a revealed source of morality. The moral
law came from within nature, or to be more precise from
the divine within nature: 'the source of all morality in
man is the Universal Spirit dwelling in the spirits'. God
appeared not in the Bible, but in the natural working of
the moral law within each of us. Moreover, her new God neither
damned people for eternity nor exulted in suffering. Justice
and the possibility of a triumph over evil were assured
by the operation of the moral law within the natural order.
There was no hint of a transcendental realm where judgement
could lead to perpetual torment.
Theism did not satisfy Besant for long. In 1874, she began
to question the very existence of God. She re-read Dean
Mansell's Bampton Lectures of 1858, and found them painfully
apologetic. She read Comte and found him inspiring - the
'greatest' thinker 'of this century'. Like many British
positivists, she rejected the positive polity as anathema
to liberty, but she commended Comte's amalgamation of the
scientific temper with a religion of humanity as a suitable
solution to the growing divide between the material and
the spiritual. Earlier Mrs Conway had suggested Besant visit
the Hall of Science to hear Bradlaugh speak. Now Besant's
positivism led her to the publisher and bookseller Edward
Truelove, where she purchased a copy of the National Reformer.
She wrote to ask if she could join the National Secular
Society (N.S.S.) even though she was not an atheist. The
editor replied she could, so she did. Her positivist readings
had taught her that the concept of God was an alienation
of the potential of man, that her youthful love of Christ
was 'the human passion of love transferred to an ideal'.
Now she visited Bradlaugh, and showed him a pamphlet she
had written on the existence of God. He told her they believed
much the same things, and, a couple of days later, offered
her a staff job on the National Reformer. She accepted and
began to write under the pseudonym 'Ajax'. Her struggle
with doubt had led her to secularism.
Besant took to her secularist work with gusto, writing
regular columns and pamphlets, and becoming an exceptional
public speaker second in popularity only to Bradlaugh himself.
Her atheism centred on the idea that the universe consisted
of one substance - she rejected dualism, claiming matter
and spirit were merely different manifestations of the one
substance. Consequently, she argued, if there were a deity,
he must be identified with this one substance of nature,
but then nature provided no evidence of such a conscious
power. Indeed, because we could have knowledge only of phenomena,
we could not possibly have any evidence for something beyond
phenomena. As an atheist, therefore, she did not say there
was no God, but rather she knew nothing of God, she could
not conceive what God could be. God had no meaning for her,
so she could not say whether or not there was a God. She
was without God. Nonetheless, while she argued we could
not make sense of the idea of God, she also pointed out
that to describe God as unknowable was to make a claim to
know something about God. What is more, she claimed all
existing attempts to define God became immersed in contradictions
that showed them to be false. She said, 'never yet has a
God been defined in terms which were not palpably self-contradictory
and absurd'.
Science had killed off the idea of God. We could give sufficient
explanations of all events within the universe solely in
terms of facts about nature. We did not need to appeal to
anything beyond the immediate phenomena available to our
inspection. Here Besant rejected the pantheist view that
the one substance in the universe was life-matter in favour
of the scientific view that it was force-matter. Life arose
as a consequence of certain arrangements of force-matter
that constituted the animal body. Thus, all knowledge came
down to the sciences of biology, chemistry and physics.
Although the rejection of the Bible had left scientists
without a settled standard by which to judge their conclusions,
a settled standard actually would prove inimical to intellectual
progress. Scientists should settle for the abstract standard
of truth. 'They would have to be content to collect facts
patiently, to collate them carefully, to reason from them,
to reach conclusions slowly.' After all, was not the motto
of the N.S.S. 'We Search for Truth'?
Although Besant fired vicious, caustic missiles at Christianity,
her secularism resembled that of Robert Owen, not Thomas
Paine. She had little objection to religion as such, but
rather detested Christian dogmatism, and regretted the way
a concern with God so often detracted from a concern with
man. Thus, although she criticised theosophy as vague and
superstitious, she wrote a fairly welcoming review of Edwin
Arnold's work on the life of the Buddha. Furthermore, unlike
Bradlaugh, she forswore a strict individualism for an ethical
positivism that gazed sentimentally on abstract humanity.
She spoke in terms indebted to a Comtean idea of a religion
of humanity, saying 'I do not believe in God' but 'I believe
in Man.' She believed 'in man's redeeming power; in man's
remoulding energy; in man's approaching triumph, through
knowledge, love, and work'.
An ethical positivism underlay Besant's concern to give
social morality a sure foothold independent of Christianity.
She feared our sense of social duty might go under in the
struggle over religious faith, so she argued people should
attack the sanctions currently underlying morality only
if they had suitable replacements close at hand. 'It is
then', she said, 'a very important question whether we,
who are endeavouring to take away from the world the authority
on which has hitherto been based all its morality, can offer
a new and firm ground whereupon may safely be built up the
fair edifice of a noble life.' According to Besant, moral
behaviour did not consist of conformity to supernatural
rules outside of the nature of things so much as living
in harmony with the natural world. Just as physical actions
in accord with physical nature produced physical vigour,
so moral actions were those that followed the moral laws
of nature thereby producing moral vigour. Christians were
wrong: authority could not provide a proper basis for morality
for the sufficient reason that the Bible was not true. Theists
too were wrong: intuition could not provide a proper basis
for morality since intuition could not give us knowledge
of external, natural laws. Besant concluded, therefore,
because morality entailed harmony with a natural law, and
because we could not discover this law by either revelation
or intuition, 'the true basis of morality must necessarily
be sought for in the study of law, as manifested in phenomena'.
Besant argued that only utilitarianism founded morality
on a scientific basis. Once we recognised happiness as the
criterion for right and wrong, we could see moral laws existed
just as certainly as did physical ones. She justified this
contentious view by reference to her belief that when an
action brought pain, the pain told us the action was the
wrong one and so immoral. Unhappiness was 'Nature's check
to our mistakes'. When we acted immorally so as to cause
unhappiness, the natural law asserted itself and we felt
unhappy and thereby knew we had acted immorally. Thus, the
moral law derived from the very nature of things. Next Besant
went on to insist that, because morality exhibited itself
as a natural law appearing in phenomena, we could study
the relevant phenomena so as to discover how best to act
morally and conquer evil. Only ignorance and vested interests
prevented our triumph over evil.
Utilitarianism can be a slippery doctrine. On one level,
the identification of the morally good with that which promotes
the general happiness appears almost as a necessary but
vacuous truth since we can subsume most other moral doctrines
under the umbrella concept of happiness. On another level,
as soon as anyone gives any positive content to the umbrella
concept of happiness, utilitarianism becomes highly contentious.
Besant played on the ambiguous nature of utilitarianism.
She fended off potential critics by stretching the concept
of happiness so as to embrace them. If, for instance, a
critic objected that virtue, not happiness, provided the
core of human morality, she replied that virtue was happiness
since the higher pleasures came from doing good to others
by acting virtuously. Likewise, if a critic objected that
the moral nature of virtue derived from the will of God,
not happiness, she replied that surely people wished to
please God precisely because they found happiness in doing
so. Yet when Besant gave content to the concept of happiness,
she drew on an ethical positivism that distances her somewhat
from J. S. Mill and even further from Bentham. She identified
the attempt to promote the general happiness with 'the endeavour
so to rule our life that we may serve and bless mankind'.
She praised utilitarianism for helping to foster the idea
of a universal brotherhood in which each aimed for the greater
good of the whole. It is a strange utilitarian - hardly
a utilitarian at all - who can write, 'little worth liberty
and equality with all their promise for mankind, little
worth even wider happiness, if that happiness be selfish,
if true fraternity, true brotherhood, do not knit man to
man, and heart to heart, in loyal service to the common
need, and generous self sacrifice to the common good'.
As a secularist and radical, Besant believed in a 'coming
reign of Liberty, when men shall dare to think for themselves
in theology, and to act for themselves in politics'. Like
the Owenites, she moved from her concern for a social morality
that would promote universal brotherhood through the belief
that social evils derived from ignorance and vested interests
to political radicalism. Greater knowledge and democracy
could heal society of the ills currently afflicting it.
She attacked the Church for defending superstitions that
turned 'men's eyes from earth'. And she attacked the landed
elite with their vested interests for preventing progress
through their control of parliament. Here she argued that
poverty arose from low wages, which, in turn, arose from
over-population. Thus, if the poor knew how to control the
size of their families, they could raise wages and end poverty.
The solution to poverty lay in the removal of ignorance
through the dissemination of information on contraceptive
methods. Yet the Church opposed the spread of this information
on grounds of indecency, and parliament, most of whose members
benefited from low wages, backed the church.
Clearly Besant's secularism met the doctrinal requirements
implied by her earlier doubt. For a start, she evaluated
claims to knowledge by reference to an abstract concept
of scientific truth, not religious authorities. Because
she equated truth with a materialist interpretation of contemporary
science, she found it easy both to incorporate scientific
theories such as that of evolution into her understanding
of the physical universe, and to exclude all references
to the supernatural from her view of the truth. Moreover,
her blend of utilitarianism and ethical positivism provided
a suitable account of the place of morality in the universe.
Because she saw physical pain and pleasure as nature's way
of informing us about the morality of our actions, she was
able to give a natural account of morality. And because
she unpacked the utilitarian concept of happiness in terms
of a humanitarian concern with social duty, she was able
to guarantee the survival of morality in a secular future.
Socialism
In January 1885, Besant applied to join the Fabian Society,
a part of the nascent socialist movement. The N.S.S. provided
both a fruitful recruiting ground for socialists and the
locus of vehement opposition to socialism. Many secularists,
including Bradlaugh, were strict individualists who denounced
socialism as a threat to liberty. To them Besant's conversion
was heretical. Nonetheless, there were similarities between
socialism and secularism, and they help to explain Besant's
conversion. First, the humanitarian appeals made by early
socialists appealed to the positivist ethic of some secularists.
One can see this not only in people like Edward Aveling
and Herbert Burrows who joined the socialism movement with
a secularist background, but also in the widespread commitment
to ethical positivism within the Fabian Society. Sydney
Olivier's crisis of faith produced much family tension and
ended with his describing Comte as 'very much the most comprehensive
thinker we have had since Aristotle'; Edward Pease and Frank
Podmore argued persistently for a socialism embodying ethical
positivism; Graham Wallas's first publication considered
'Personal Duty Under the Present System'; and even Sidney
Webb approached his socialism by way of positivism. Besant
herself first reacted favourably to socialism on 12 January
1883 when she heard Louise Michel, an anarcho-communist,
lecture movingly on the need for a greater sense of brotherhood
if society were to alleviate the plight of the starving
women and children in the slums of Paris. Second, the radicalism
of most secularists included commitments to land reform
and republican sympathies, commitments that required little
modification to become a common form of contemporary socialism
in which capitalists became exploiters akin to landlords,
and the socialist ideal became a social republic of workers
free from idlers. One can see this especially in the way
a group of O'Brienites, including Charles Murray, conceived
of their Marxism, but also in the arguments of better known
figures such as H. M. Hyndman, William Morris, and George
Bernard Shaw. Besant's own radicalism already incorporated
many of the demands of the early socialists, and she had
extensive contacts with the metropolitan clubs on the extreme
left of the republican and land reform movements of the
1870s. In June 1884, she spoke to the Cromwell Club at Plaistow
on 'Social Reform or Socialism', arguing against the acquisition
of wealth at the expense of labour, and calling for social
reforms to relieve the lot of the workers, but stopping
short of calling for socialism. Within a month, she had
adopted the characteristic demands of the Marxist Social
Democratic Federation. She advocated the taxation of interest
on capital as well as land rent, and she called for an eight-hour
working day with five hours on Saturdays.
At first Besant opposed the S.D.F. because she disapproved
of its advocating a violent revolution while free agitation
remained possible, not because she was a strict individualist
akin to Bradlaugh. Now she found not only that socialist
economics explained why so many people remained poor despite
mechanisation, not only that socialist ethics paralleled
her ideal of a universal brotherhood of individuals sacrificing
themselves for the greater good of the whole, but also that
Fabian socialism remained committed to parliamentary constitutionalism.
She announced her conversion at a dramatic meeting of the
Dialectical Society in January 1885. Shaw gave a lecture,
with the audience expecting Besant to demolish the socialist
case. Instead, she expressed an interest in socialism, and
later asked Shaw to propose her for membership of the Fabian
Society.
Besant's socialism drew on her secularist response to the
doctrinal requirements implied by her earlier doubt. The
scientific side of her socialism took over her secularist
philosophy, including her concern to incorporate the theory
of evolution into her worldview. She proclaimed socialism
as 'the new Truth'. Socialism was a science precisely because
Besant equated it with the theory of evolution, insisting
'I am a Socialist because I am a believer in Evolution'.
The path of universal history exhibited the gradual evolution
of social co-operation, integration, and organisation. 'The
progress of society has been from individualistic anarchy
to associated order; from universal, unrestricted competition
to competition regulated and restrained by law'. Socialists
alone grasped the nature of the historical process, and
advocated measures designed to advance it. Her collectivist
ideal - like that of most Fabians - consisted less in a
particular system of property ownership than in the gradual
extension of state regulation to ensure a more integrated
and efficient society. Besant also appealed to economic
arguments for socialism. She said, 'my socialism is based
on the recognition of economic facts, on the study of the
results which flow inevitably from the present economic
system'. Socialism rested on a scientific economic theory.
Besant argued that under capitalism the factors of production
were divorced from one another, so the workers, lacking
land and capital, had to sell their labour or starve. Radicals
saw how landlords claimed rent in return for allowing people
to use the land. Socialists extended the argument to capitalists.
Capitalists controlled the 'wealth made by generations of
toilers, the present means of production', and they allowed
workers access to the means of production only in return
for 'a share of the worker's product'. More generally, Besant
argued the evolutionary philosophy of socialism united the
diverse demands of the radicals. The need for social integration
underlay radical calls for land reform, the eight hour day,
free education, and the like. As she explained, 'just as
Evolution, taking up the chaos of biological facts, sets
them forth as an intelligible and correlated order, so Socialism,
dealing with the chaos of sociological facts, brings a unifying
principle, which turns Radicalism from a mere empirical
system into a reasoned, coherent, and scientific whole'.
Socialism was a scientific radicalism.
According to Besant, socialism was not a negative philosophy
concerned to end exploitation, but rather a moral ideal,
an ethical positivism. Socialism had grown out of 'a profound
moral impulse' of 'unselfish brotherhood'. It represented
a new religion of man. Socialists aimed to serve the cause
of humanity. Thus, the socialist movement was not 'a class
movement', but rather 'a movement of men and women of all
classes for a common end'; 'the Socialist army is composed
of persons of various social ranks, who have renounced for
themselves the class distinctions they are banded together
to destroy'. Besant saw socialism as a economic movement
to eliminate exploitation and also a moral movement to promote
universal brotherhood in place of class divisions. These
two themes underlay her attitude to the trade union movement.
In the first place, she said Malthusianism showed trade
unions could not have a general, lasting impact on wages:
'wages rise and fall irrespective of unions and are not
controllable by them'. In the second place, however, trade
unions embodied a 'willingness to subordinate the one to
the all', 'to use strength for mutual support' in accord
with 'the higher social morality'. In particular, the growth
of a new unionism among women and the unskilled suggested
trade unions soon would embrace all the workers. Where the
old unions had stood for exclusivity and so class-feeling,
the new unions strove for brotherhood.
Theosophy
The ethical positivism within Besant's socialism came to
the fore in February 1888. She announced she and others
had talked 'of founding a new brotherhood, in which service
of Man should take the place erstwhile given to service
of God - a brotherhood in which work should be worship and
love should be baptism'. They had talked of a 'Church of
the future to lead 'the teaching of social duty, the upholding
of social righteousness, the building up of a true commonwealth'.
To promote such a Church, Besant began to publish a new
journal entitled The Link and subtitled 'A Journal for the
Servants of Man'. She had come to believe too many of her
fellow socialists overemphasised the economic side of social
reform. She wanted to stress the need for a new social morality
to inspire people to sacrifice themselves for the good of
others. She wanted to promote a moral transformation based
on a social ideal.
Besant's increasing emphasis on the need for a moral transformation
reflected a deeper shift in her thought. Around 1886, she
became interested in certain mental phenomena she found
she could not explain in terms of her atheistic materialism.
She began to investigate peripheral aspects of consciousness
such as dreams, and also psychic phenomena such as mesmerism.
She read a report by the Dialectical Society on experiments
in psychic research. The report convinced her there was
something there to be explained. Besant's belief in the
significance of psychic phenomena was not unusual. Scholars
such as Janet Oppenheim and Alex Owen have shown how people
from all sorts of backgrounds entered the spiritualist movement
within the context of the Victorian crisis of faith. Among
those who became interested in spiritualism were a number
of people who, like Besant, had backgrounds in the secularist
and socialist movements. Secularists such as Seth Ackroyd,
Herbert Burrows, E. W. Wallis, and, of course, Alfred Russell
Wallace found spiritualism answered the questions that earlier
had led them away from the evangelical Protestantism of
their childhood. Likewise, socialists such as Pease and
Podmore were active members of the Society for Psychical
Research, whilst various plebeian radicals and Owenites
went on to embrace all of secularism, socialism, and spiritualism.
Watching seances, manifestations and the like, numerous
Victorians assumed what they saw was for real. Besides,
if none of the spiritualist phenomena were genuine, respectable
people were lying, and few Victorians questioned the honour
of their fellows. To have believed so many gentlefolk capable
of falsehood would have been nearly as difficult as to believe
some spiritualist phenomena to be genuine. Thus, Besant
came to accept the facts before she did the theory. She
thought the phenomena 'indubitable, but the spiritualistic
explanation of them incredible'. Nor was the explanation
all that incredible. The scientific community was still
establishing itself as a profession with a definite institutional
basis, and even today science tells us little about how
we should treat mental events. Thus, Besant initially turned
to spiritualism because of the way it helped to make sense
of psychological phenomena. Only later did she extend her
spiritualistic understanding from the mental to the physical.
Before long Besant began to hold seances in her home in
St. John's Wood, London. Friends even began to talk of her
joining the ranks of the spiritualists. As Besant investigated
psychic happenings, so she became convinced of the need
for a more spiritual understanding of the world about her,
and as she searched for just such an understanding, so she
turned towards a more spiritual form of socialism. In this
way, her move to a more ethical form of socialism reflected
her growing conviction that 'Pantheism' might solve 'some
problems, especially of psychology, which Atheism leaves
untouched'.
William Stead, a liberal newspaper man, helped Besant to
found The Link. He too had an interest in occult phenomena:
he first attended a seance in 1881, and soon afterwards
he met Madame Blavatsky. In 1889, he received a review copy
of Blavatsky's The Secret Doctrine, and, knowing Besant
had an interest in occultism, he sent it to her. Besant
reviewed the work sympathetically, saying 'Truth will give
scrutiny to any visitant, be the garb of Asia or of Europe.'
She did not go so far, however, as to equate theosophical
teachings with the truth. After reading The Secret Doctrine,
Besant asked Stead to introduce her to Blavatsky, and having
done so a couple of times, she inquired about joining the
Theosophical Society, eventually doing so on 10 May 1889.
When she then reviewed The Secret Doctrine for the National
Reformer, she wrote as a new convert to theosophy who believed
Blavatsky possessed a superior, eastern knowledge. She argued
the western approach to truth grilled nature in a quest
for facts whereas the eastern approach exercised the mind
to develop faculties unknown in the west. Whereas western
facts merely confirmed things long known in the east, occult
phenomena pointed to truths recognised in the east but still
ignored in the west.
The conviction that the east embodied a spiritual knowledge
the west lacked was an increasingly common one within Victorian
society. The Empire inspired some remarkable studies of
Indian culture, and while the majority of western thinkers
were only too happy to dismiss this culture as backward,
a significant minority turned to an idealised version of
it as an alternative to a materialistic and soulless west.
The romantics in particular often tied their belief in the
mystical powers of nature to an interpretation of eastern
religions as pantheistic and eastern societies as intrinsically
spiritual. Blavatsky's theosophy could draw, therefore,
on a stock of cultural images of the east already made familiar
by the romantics. Although eminent scholars such as F. Max
Muller occasionally complained about the inaccuracy of the
view of Indian religions adopted by romantics and theosophists,
their popular orientalism continued to thrive. What is more,
the romantic view of eastern religions as pantheistic made
these religions ideal as forms of faith to which Victorians
such as Besant could turn to find the immanentism with which
so many of them met the challenge of Darwinism. Pantheistic
interpretations of Buddhism and Hinduism made them peculiarly
attractive to people struggling to come to terms with the
theory of evolution. Indeed, Blavatsky devised theosophy
in a self-conscious attempt to provide the spiritualist
movement with philosophical foundations taken from a popular
orientalism. She said theosophy related to spiritualism
'as the infinite to the finite, as cause to effect, or as
unity to multifariousness'. Blavatsky met Henry Olcott,
the other leading theosophist, at Chittenden in Vermont
where they had gone to explore a spiritualist manifestation.
When the British Theosophical Society was formed on 27 June
1878, many of its members, including its leader, Charles
Massey, and its later president, Dr George Wyld, were members
of the British National Association of Spiritualists. Many
of those who later played prominent roles in the Society
during the nineteenth century had backgrounds in the spiritualist
movement, including A. O. Hume and A. P. Sinnett, the recipients
of the infamous Mahatma Letters.
The distance from secularism and socialism to theosophy
was not as great as one might suppose. As a theosophist,
Besant's beliefs still provided suitable solutions to the
dilemmas that had led her away from her childhood faith.
The problems remained the same, and, more importantly, the
nature of the problems was such that both sets of solutions
revolved around the twin themes of scientific truth and
ethical positivism. Besant later recalled that as soon as
she read The Secret Doctrine, she knew 'the very Truth was
found'. Her first contribution to theosophical literature
outlined a set of practical measures by which theosophists
might promote universal brotherhood. Theosophy may seem
a bizarre creed to many of us today, as no doubt it also
did to many of Besant's contemporaries. The cosmology and
anthropology of Blavatsky's Secret Doctrine certainly run
counter to the beliefs most of us accept as objective. I
have suggested, however, that we should try to avoid understanding
and evaluating theosophy using our view of what is and is
not objectively rational. We should try rather to uncover
the contextual rationality of theosophy by exploring the
particular commitments and problems with which people such
as Besant approached it. We can begin to do this by showing
how Besant's theosophy, like her secularism and socialism,
was a response to the commitments and problems set up by
her crisis of faith.
Besant believed any adequate account of the universe had
to steer clear of supernaturalism and also take on board
evolutionary theory. Her theosophy did both. No doubt others
will think theosophy entails a belief in objects outside
the natural order, but they will do so because of their
view of the natural order, and here too we should avoid
using our assumptions to understand and evaluate others.
Taken on its own terms theosophy in general, and Besant's
theosophy in particular, do not entail any supernaturalism.
Certainly Besant fully accepted Blavatsky's teachings about
a brotherhood of adepts based in Tibet who possessed extraordinary
occult powers they used to watch over humanity and to preserve
the ancient wisdom unimpaired. However, theosophists believe
the Mahatmas are not supernatural entities, but rather part
of the natural order. They are highly spiritual beings near
the end of their evolutionary cycle who have chosen to remain
around to help the less advanced. An improbable doctrine
perhaps, but not in its own terms a supernatural one. Certainly
too Besant believed ancient oriental texts such as the Upanishads
taught the ancient wisdom. Unlike the Bible, however, these
texts were not supernatural revelations, but rather the
works of adepts who were themselves part of the natural
order. Theosophy eschewed the supernatural.
As for evolution, Besant's theosophy exemplifies the late
Victorian tendency to turn to immanentism as a way of reconciling
faith with science. She argued God was immanent within nature,
saying 'He is in everything and everything in Him.' Because
my concern lies with the bare bones of her philosophy, with
how it met the requirements set up by her crisis of faith,
I will not go into the vast array of planes, from physical
to nirvanic, of races, from Lemurians to Aryans, or of stages
in the occult hierarchy, from chela to chohan, that provide
the flesh of theosophical cosmologies and anthropologies.
What interests me is Besant's belief that God gradually
unfolded Himself through time in an evolutionary process.
At first God manifested Himself by limiting Himself, and
in manifesting Himself, He became the universe. Next the
manifested absolute began to unfold from an initial state
of unity towards a duality of life and form, of spirit and
spirit-matter, which constituted the world of nature. This
duality of positive and negative then unfolded into a trinity
with universal mind appeared alongside life and form. The
universal mind contained the archetypal forms of all the
beings that emerged during later stages of the unfolding
of the universe. The later stages started with the rise
of the spiritual intelligences that now guide the cosmic
order. From then on, the universe continued to unfold away
from the pure unity of the undivided absolute, through the
seven planes of the universe, until things reached the nadir
of an almost totally physical existence, after which the
universe began the long trek back through the same seven
planes to end once more as the undivided divinity underlying
everything. Theosophists argued the late nineteenth-century
constituted the nadir of the evolutionary process. It was
the end of the Black Age - the Koli-Yuga of the Hindus -
with humanity being almost entirely material in nature and
outlook. The twentieth-century would bring the dawn of the
New Age - the Raja-Yuga of the Hindus. The evolutionary
cycle would take an upward turn with humanity becoming increasingly
spiritual in nature and outlook. Indeed, from evolutionary
theory, through spiritualism, to the more obvious interventions
of the Mahatmas in human affairs, almost everything then
happening provided a first glimmering of the New Age.
Most secularists saw Besant's conversion to theosophy as
a betrayal. However, the place of science within theosophical
teachings helps to explain why Besant and a few others,
such as Burrows, saw theosophy as a superior alternative
to their earlier secularism. More generally, a number of
secularists, especially those inspired by Owen and G. J.
Holyoake rather than Paine and Bradlaugh, later turned to
various forms of mystical immanentism in much the same way
as Besant and Burrows did to theosophy, and sometimes they
too did so by way of spiritualism. Certainly people such
as Richard Bithell, F. J. Gould, Samuel Laing, and C. A.
Watts left the secularist movement because they found a
suitable response to the crisis of faith in an evolutionary
creed and worship of the Unknowable. Besant saw her theosophical
cosmology as an evolutionary account of an 'unfolding, self-moved
from within'. She recognised some biologists held a purely
mechanical theory of evolution that described a simple process
of action and reaction between the environment and the organism.
She argued, however, a purely mechanical theory of evolution
could not explain why the organism should react to the environment
in the first place. Besides, Besant's investigations into
dreams, mesmerism, and spiritualist phenomena had convinced
her a mechanical view of the world could not account for
the facts being uncovered by the new science of psychology.
Contemporary science, she insisted, was fast coming to recognise
everything embodied a spiritual element. Only a spiritual
understanding of evolution showed how the divine consciousness
found in all matter acted as the mainspring of the movement
of the individual organism. According to Besant, therefore,
theosophy not only incorporated recent scientific discoveries
such as evolution, it also went beyond our everyday scientific
understanding to reveal the true, metaphysical explanation
of these discoveries.
Besant argued her theosophical cosmology led inexorably
to certain ethical theories by way of the doctrine of reincarnation
and the law of Karma. Her immanentism postulated an indestructible
ego that obviously had to go somewhere after death, and
since she had outlawed the supernatural, this somewhere
had to be either a return to the physical plane or an ascension
to another plane. Moreover, her evolutionary theory implied
the indestructible ego had to reappear on the physical plane
simply because each individual needed numerous different
lives in order to evolve in the requisite manner. Ultimately,
therefore, as she explained, 'the clearest conviction of
the truth of reincarnation' lies in 'the obvious necessity
for many lives' for the indestructible ego to evolve through
all 'the ascending stages of consciousness'. Her defence
of reincarnation consisted principally of an extension of
the theory of evolution from the physical world to the spiritual
world. Just as the evolution of the physical world presupposed
the continuation of spirit-matter, so the evolution of mental
and moral qualities presupposed the continuation of the
indestructible ego; just as spirit matter evolved through
interaction with an environment, so the indestructible ego
had to evolve through interaction with an environment, to
do which it had to become incarnate in an outer shell.
The law of karma followed from acceptance of reincarnation.
When an individual passed through physical death, the ego
shed the physical, astral, and mental bodies, leaving only
the inner person. The inner person then took on a new outer
body in order to reappear on the physical plane. Given that
this process was natural, and Besant ruled out supernaturalism,
there had to be a law of cause and effect to explain why
things happened as they did in actual instances of reincarnation.
The law of karma provided such an explanation. When the
inner person shed its outer bodies, the indestructible ego
was left with a record of the past experiences it had had
while clothed in these bodies. Moreover, because the inner
person retained a record of its past experiences, these
experiences necessarily would affect how it then acted and
so what future experiences it would have. Past lives influence
future lives. Each individual has a karma.
The law of karma met the doctrinal requirements set by
Besant's early doubts. For a start, it implied morality
and the moral nature of the universe had a natural basis
in a law of cause and effect. Current evils were a necessary
consequence of the evil in our past actions. Furthermore,
a belief in karma implied individuals got what they deserved
because their thoughts, desires, and actions influenced
what happened to them in future lives. Although individuals
were free to act as they pleased, the law of karma stated
every action had certain natural effects on the person who
thus acted, so if people acted immorally, their actions
just would bring them future pain. The sins of the earlier
incarnations would be visited upon the later one. The link
between such a view and Besant's early doubt shines out
from her comment that 'the religionist who hopes to escape
from the consequences of his own misdeeds through some side-door
of vicarious atonement, may well shrink from the stern enunciation
of the law of karma'. Finally, Besant's belief in the law
of karma implied we could perhaps conquer evil - if we acted
selflessly, all bad karma would disappear - while her teleological
theory of evolution implied we necessarily would conquer
evil - as the universe returned to its original undivided
state so evil would vanish and everything would enter the
blissful, nirvanic plane. Because immorality brought unhappiness,
individuals eventually would learn not to desire objects
that in the end brought them only sorrow. Eventually individuals
would learn to act in accord with the moral law. The link
between such a view and Besant's early doubt again shines
our from her belief that 'without reincarnation we have
no security' but 'with reincarnation man is a dignified
immortal being, evolving towards a divinely glorious end'.
Besant also thought her cosmology led inexorably to certain
more substantive moral doctrines. In particular, her immanentist
metaphysics supported an ethic of universal brotherhood
akin to her earlier ethical positivism. As she explained,
'if there be one life, one consciousness, if in every form
God be immanent, then all forms are interlinked with one
another', 'that is the inevitable corollary of the Immanence
of God, and that is Solidarity, that is universal Brotherhood'.
Besant argued when life had become embodied in matter, the
appearance of separate physical bodies had encouraged people
to think of themselves as independent beings, thereby giving
rise to selfishness. Now, however, as people increasingly
came to recognise they all partook of the one life, so they
would recognise 'our work here [on earth] is the work of
a duty to common human need'.
Universal brotherhood required individuals to sacrifice
themselves for the good of the whole. Indeed, a law of sacrifice
lay at the heart of the cosmic order. The evolutionary process
consisted of a series of steps, each of which began with
an act of sacrifice during which one form of life perished
so the life might pour itself out into another form. The
universe even originated in an act of sacrifice, with God
voluntarily limiting his infinite being in order to become
manifest. Contrary to popular opinion, therefore, sacrifice
did not involve pain. Sacrifice was a joyful pouring out
of one's own life so others could share in life. If only
those who sacrificed themselves rightly identified themselves
with the life that persisted after the sacrifice rather
than with the form that perished in the sacrifice, then
they would exult in the outpouring of eternal life instead
of mourning the passing of the transient form. If people
saw rightly, they would find the sacrifice and service demanded
by ethical positivism actually derived from the very structure
of the universe.
Most socialists saw Besant's conversion to theosophy as
a betrayal. However, the place of an ethical positivism
within theosophical teachings helps to explain why not only
Besant, but also people such as Herbert Burrows and L. Haden
Guest looked upon theosophy as the fulfilment of their socialism.
Guest argued theosophy led to calls for social reconstruction
along lines exhibiting a Fabian mix of elitism and humanitarianism;
Charlotte Despard saw theosophy as the true inspiration
behind her socialism and suffragism; and numerous socialists
joined the International Fellowship of Workers, an organisation
affiliated to the Theosophical Society, with Walter Crane
as its president. Similarly, the guild socialist, A. R.
Orage organised a Theosophical Group in the 1890s after
immersing himself in Blavatsky's writings, and before going
on to become the editor of the influential journal, New
Age. All sorts of people combined socialism, or a loose
progressive humanitarianism, with theosophy, or a vague
immanentist mysticism. Certainly Besant herself equated
the theosophical ideal of a universal brotherhood with the
social morality she had come to see as the true basis of
a socialist society. Moreover, her socialism, like that
of many of the Fabians, had an elitist ring to it; the emphasis
was on an intellectual elite organising society for the
good of all, technocrats doing their duty by the poor. The
same attitude appears in her theosophy. She looked to a
spiritual elite, led ultimately by the Mahatmas themselves,
to work for the advance of humanity. Members of the elite
were defined by their mental and moral strength, not their
birth, and it was their very strength that placed upon them
their special burden. As Besant told her fellow theosophists,
'it is the weak that have rights, the strong have duties'.
Theosophy, like socialism, worked for the uplift of all,
and a human community based on an ethic of solidarity.
Conclusion
Earlier biographers have failed to find any intellectual
continuity or coherence in Besant's life. They have failed
to do so, it seems to me, because they have operated, albeit
implicitly, with an objective concept of rationality that
has required them to see New Age thought as a flight from
reason. Because they dismissed Besant's theosophy as irrational,
the only continuities left for them to find in her life
were emotional ones - the sort of needs that might explain
her abdication of reason. In contrast, I have operated with
a weaker, contextual concept of rationality that opens up
the possibility of our seeing New Age thought as reasonable
in the context of certain prior commitments and problems.
Thus, I have tried to represent Besant's life as an intelligible
quest for truth within the intellectual and social context
of Victorian Britain. Her experience of the widespread crisis
of faith posed dilemmas she spent the rest of her life attempting
to resolve. She sought the truth understood as a scientific
account of nature that excluded the supernatural, and she
sought a way of sustaining a concern with social duty by
showing the moral law to be part of nature. Cultural and
social pressures encouraged her to seek these things in
certain types of movements. She was pushed by her educational
background towards movements that used an accessible theory
as a basis for propaganda and agitation, and she was pushed
by the failure of her marriage towards movements that encouraged
unconventional ways of living. It was, therefore, Besant's
crisis of faith moderated by specific social pressures that
led her successively to secularism, socialism, and theosophy.
Her departures from secularism to socialism, and later from
socialism to theosophy, do not represent complete breaks
(betrayals) brought on by the arrival of a new man in her
life. They represent successive attempts to answer the same
basic questions, with each new answer also being a response
to the perceived failings of the earlier one. From her perspective,
as opposed to ours, her socialism united the diverse demands
of her earlier secular radicalism into a single scientific
programme, while her theosophy accounted for the new psychological
facts that had been revealed by the spiritualists and that
she could not account for from within her secular socialism.
Besant turned to theosophy as part of an intelligible quest
for truth, not because a hidden emotional need led her to
adopt irrational beliefs. Moreover, I have tried to show
her intelligible quest for truth overlaps with that of a
number of others whose changing beliefs are known to us.
If her prominence, and to a lesser extent the very diversity
of her activities, make her a unique figure, the reasons
she had for turning to each of the movements she did were
shared by many others within those movements. Besant's quest
for truth exemplifies many of the key characteristics of
the intellectual life of late Victorian Britain. Her crisis
of faith resembles that of many of her contemporaries in
centring on Biblical literalism and atonement. It was this
crisis of faith that in various guises led not only her
but others such as Aveling, Burrows, Bradlaugh, and Charles
Watts, to secularism. Aveling, Burrows, and also Shaw provide
examples of secularists who like her became socialists,
whilst Olivier, Pease, Podmore, Wallas, and Web provide
examples of socialists inspired by evolutionary theory and
ethical positivism. Again, Pease and Podmore like her combined
socialism and an interest in spiritualism, whilst Ackroyd,
Burrows, and numerous plebeian radicals like her approached
spiritualism from an overtly secularist background. Finally,
Burrows again, Despard, Guest, and others moved from socialism
to theosophy, whilst numerous people saw theosophy as a
natural extension of their spiritualism - Hume, Massey,
Olcott, Sinnett, and others.
The example of Besant suggests theosophy attracted people
because of the way it enabled them to meet the Victorian
crisis of faith, and theosophy is a source of much of the
New Age movement. Perhaps, therefore, we should see the
New Age movement as a reasonable response to intellectual
commitments and problems that arose in the Victorian age.
New Age thought is not an irrational alternative to the
rational secularism of a post-Christian modernity, but rather
an intelligible response to the same intellectual commitments
and problems that underlay the rise of Victorian secularism.
If most of us prefer secular science to its New Age competitors,
this is because our prior theories and concerns lead us
to see the world in one way rather than another. However,
unless we are to defend the problematic notion of theory-free
facts, we should not pretend to ourselves that our way of
seeing the world is uniquely rational - rational for all
people no matter what their theories and concerns. We should
not set up our secular science as a universal, objective
form of rationality against which we then can dismiss New
Age thought as an emotional flight from reason.
Biographical Note
Mark Bevir received his D.Phil. from the University of Oxford.
He is now a member of the Department of Political Science,
University of California, Berkeley. His recent publications
include The Logic of the History of Ideas (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1999).
Contact Information
Department of Political Science, University of California,
Berkeley, CA 94720-1950
Email: mbevir@socrates.berkeley.edu
Source
"Annie Besant's Quest for Truth" was originally
published in The Journal of Ecclesiastical History,
vol. 50 (1999), pp. 215-239, and is reproduced here with
the permission of the publisher (Cambridge
University Press) and the author.
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