Celibacy, Continence, Monasticism

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Confusing Words Series · 7 pages

From Blavatsky Collected Writings XII, under the heading Diagnoses and Palliatives, and written as a defence of Tolstoy against his English reviewers. The author of Anna Karenina stood accused of ignoring human nature by one critic, called the most conspicuous case out of Bedlam by another and the ex-great artist by a third, for saying that no marriage at all would be better than the desecration of what his church regards as a sacrament. Vanity Fair had called him an extremist on the ground that the present marriage system, even taken as the vile thing he makes of it, is a lesser evil than the monasticism he preaches.

The reply is that Tolstoy preaches nothing of the sort, and that his critics misunderstand him from A to Z — as they also misunderstand the saying that it is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a man but what comes out of it. What he preaches, in her reading, is not monasticism but the law of continence as taught by Jesus and by occultism in an esoteric sense most Christians cannot perceive. Her own position on it is unqualified: that nothing can be more moral or more conducive to human happiness and perfectibility than the application of that law, which is ordained by nature herself and followed instinctively by animals and by the savage tribes. The three words of the title are thus separated by which of them nature sanctions.

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