The First Step towards the Temple of Truth

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Living the Life Series · 28 pages

A twenty-eight page compilation opened by an abstract and train of thoughts with page references. It shares a good deal of its argument with “The Kreutzer Sonata” elsewhere in this batch, which develops the same points about chastity and continence in response to Tolstoy's novella.

The diagnosis comes first: selfishness is named the root cause of every vice and sorrow, and self-love the prime mover of every mortal sin, with the qualification that vice and wickedness are an abnormal and unnatural manifestation at this period of human evolution rather than a permanent feature of humanity. A defence of fiction follows, unexpected in a work of this kind — that truth is often stranger than fiction, and that some fictions point out the most hidden ulcers in social life, which is the ground on which Tolstoy's novel is taken seriously elsewhere in the section. The argument then turns to conduct between men and women, holding that morality requires the law of chastity, and drawing the distinction the file insists on: that Jesus did not teach monasticism but the law of continence. Vanity is called the last and most troublesome of all vices, with the sardonic addition that in no class of society at large are deceit and craft considered divine virtues except among the clerical classes of theologians, and that in the unreal world we live in every virtue, even a papal one, is tainted with vice. The title's positive claim closes the argument — that the first step towards the Temple of Truth is a clean life — with the observation that forgiveness of injuries, contentment and pity are not exclusively Christian virtues.

Read the full text (PDF, 1.4 MB, 28 pages)