 |
Annie Besant's Quest for Truth: Christianity,
Secularism, and New Age Thought
|
by Mark Bevir |
|
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: 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. 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'.
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. Contact Information Source |
|
|