The Twin Pillars of Morality Are Inner Purity and the Noble Love of Truth and Virtue

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Buddhas and Initiates Series · 10 pages

Ten pages built on a set of questions from a correspondent signing himself with initials, printed in The Theosophist in October 1883 under the title A Plea for a Personal God. His difficulty is genuine and closely reasoned: if the solar system is the evolution of Mulaprakriti according to a design latent in Chidakasam, and man's duty is to choose between good and evil — between the means of involution into Nirvana and the means of his total destruction — then what is this destruction, given that matter is eternal?

His second question is harder still, and turns on symmetry. What is now man was in an imperfectly developed state in previous rounds, and less responsible for its acts; but if there is only one Life, and progress runs from that imperfect state through the present to Nirvana, there must have been a contrary series running the other way to arrive at the imperfect state in the first place. Blavatsky's reply is what gives the document its title: that the twin pillars of morality are inner purity and the noble love of truth and virtue — an answer about the ground of moral action rather than about cosmology, which is the move the whole exchange turns on.

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