Dogma Is a Compulsory Belief
Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Theosophy and Theosophists Series · 17 pages
Seventeen pages, opened by an abstract of central ideas. The text is Blavatsky's essay What is Truth?, first published in Lucifer volume I, number 6, February 1888, pages 425 to 433, and republished in Blavatsky Collected Writings volume IX, pages 30 to 42. The frontispiece is Jean-Léon Gérôme's Truth coming out of the well of 1896, which is apt enough: in the painting she is climbing out of it carrying a whip.
It begins where the title does, with Pilate's question and the silence that answered it — and with the observation that the silence has not stopped Pilate's successors acting as though they had received absolute truth entire, rather than the share of it that was given them in parables and dark sayings. The argument from there is epistemological before it is polemical. In a world as finite and conditioned as the man in it, there is no room for absolute truth on any subject whatever; what there is instead is an abundance of relative truths working through brain-consciousness. The image used for this is the best thing in the essay: the Sun is one, but its beams are numberless, and what they produce is beneficent or maleficent according to the nature and constitution of whatever they fall upon — polarity is universal, but the polariser lies in our own consciousness. Absolute truth is called the symbol of eternity, and since no finite mind can grasp the eternal, no truth in its fullness can ever dawn on one; a man must know himself before he can approach it, and even terrestrial truths require love and devotion to truth for its own sake before they will come. The diagnosis of why they do not come is selfishness, described as the impassable wall between the personal self and truth, and as the prolific mother of all vices — lie born out of the necessity for dissembling, hypocrisy out of the desire to mask a lie. The last third turns that on institutions without softening it, and the targets are even-handed: a society honeycombed with false smiles and mutual treachery; religion become a thin tinsel veil over the corpse of spiritual faith; scientists striving almost to a man to force a personal hobby or new-fangled theory on their colleagues for the lustre it sheds on their name; and diplomacy, whose qualification — dexterity in securing advantages for one's own country at the expense of others — can hardly be achieved by speaking truth. Against all of which the essay sets its own standard, that one skilled in divine alchemy will extract nuggets of truth from an erroneous statement as readily as from a correct one.
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