Marriage Is Licensed Vice

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, Boris de Zirkoff · Living the Life Series · 17 pages

First published in The Theosophist, Vol. IV, No. 1, October 1882, pages 6–9, and reprinted in Blavatsky Collected Writings IV pages 232–42 under the heading “The Origin of the Gospels and the Bishop of Bombay,” with an annotation by Boris de Zirkoff. A second section, on Matthew having written his Evangel in Hebrew, follows at page 11.

The occasion was a public controversy conducted in the columns of The Pioneer between supporters and critics of the Bishop of Bombay, who had issued a pastoral on divorce and remarriage. Blavatsky's opening observation is aimed at both parties equally: that the ignorance commonly prevailing among English Christians about the history of their own religious books — and, she fears, about their contents — has been amusingly illustrated by the exchange. Much ink was spilt, she writes, and still more saintly ignorance shown on both sides; the last two letters came from “One of the Laity,” who supported the bishop, and “Tübingen,” who criticised him, and she characterises the first as framed in a style that might stand equally for veiled sarcasm or for religious cant. The argument the title announces follows from that opening: that a marriage held sacred on the authority of texts whose history is not understood by those citing them has no such sanction, and that there is nothing sacred in the institution as it is defended. The second half turns to the textual question directly, on the origin of the Gospels, with de Zirkoff's annotation supplying the scholarly position.

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