... But a Christian would certainly not mean by the truth what Blavatskaya meant by it.
Some "initiation" into Russian grammar: Blavatsky is masculine, Blavatskaya is feminine. Blavatsky was, thus, the name of her father or, if she was widowed, of her late husband. Petrovna means her father's first name was Petr (feel free to pronounce it as Peter, the Russian pronunciation is actually Pyotr). That too would have been other in masculine, i e Petrov, if we had been talking about a son of that or any other Petr.
Now, at some occasion Helena Petrovna Blavatskaya signed a document as H. P. Blavatsky. In it, she declared certain beliefs that are not compatible with Christian Orthodoxy. That document - in a way her creed, Russians having such a propensity to sign creeds from the Christian tradition (like St Athanasius signed a creed and gave it to the man who was Pope when he returned via Rome from exile in Trier) - somehow has been cited on the video about her I watched and on very many other pages.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton before becoming a Christian was into the Helen Blavatsky - Annie Besant stuff. So, he, his friend Belloc, his inheritors C S Lewis and J R R Tolkien (whose friend Owen Barfield was a disciple of Rudolf Steiner and therefore HPB) did not necessarily at all believe what she believed, but they each in his way had to deal with it.
And as a Catholic coming from Gilbert Keith Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien to a country where Catholics tend to be wary of the apostate Guénon (and one "disciple" of CSL actually took a road not too far from Guénon, Dom Bede Griffiths, except of course that CSL had readers and friends but no disciples except in the history of English language and literature); as such a Catholic, I apparently too have to deal with the Blavatsky stuff more than once. Just as St Thomas Aquinas, without being himself an Averroist in this very city of Paris had to deal with Averroism. Also on more than one occasion. I think it bugged him too.
So, I will deal with her confession of belief, point after point.
[She wrote:] what I do believe in is: 1. the unbroken oral teachings revealed by living divine men during the infancy of mankind to the elect among men;
Adam and Noah (and Henoch between them) were indeed elect among men, but the one revealing truth to them was not yet a living God-Man, only so far the living God. Man he became later, as Martyrologium Romanum places the relevant 25-XII in year 5199 after Adam's creation and 2900 something* after Noah's surviving the Flood.
[She wrote:] . . . what I do believe in is: ... 2. that it has reached us unaltered;
The Primordial Revelation given to Adam, Henoch, Noah and maybe others before Abraham, has reached us in two shapes. Unaltered in the Hebrew Tradition found in the Old Testament. Altered in every other tradition in the state it was when Christians found it. Of course, the Pharao that feared the Lord, in the day of Abraham, may still have had access to an Egyptian unaltered tradition, but at least later the Egyptian tradition was altered. Nor is that Primordial Revelation sufficient in the present time, since it was merely a preparation for the fullness of Revelation, given by Jesus Christ, true eternal only begotten Son of the Father, true human Son of the Blessed Virgin Mary, true God and true Man. And of course he needed no "initiations" under the masters HPB confessed loyalty to, especially since they probably did not even exist back then.
But the altered shape of Primordial Revelation, though not sufficiently theologically true to give Eternal Salvation by itself to those believing it, was sufficiently historically true to its origin to retain traces of the Primordial Revelation sufficient to give the Hebrew Tradition a certificate of being the genuine continuation.
And when I say Hebrew Tradition, let me be very precise about believing that the Translation of the Seventy contains the right number of books and that it was a preparation for Christ, and for his Church, and also that the Masoretic version contains too few books and this because it was redacted by the enemies of Christ when they assembled at Jamnia. Let me also be very precise that what still obliges of the Old Testament is believing its story (haggada) and the Double Commandment of Charity, also the Decalogue in the manner it is received by the Roman Catholic or Greek Orthodox Church, whereas the other halachôt ceased to be necessary after the death of Christ on Calvary and that they ceased to be practicable even externally when the Temple was destroyed by Titus. Let me also be very precise that the halachôt as practised by Jewry now contain "substitutes" for the rites which the Temple took with itself to non-practise and that those substitutes, coming from Jamnia and not from Sinai, are not fulfilling the law, especially when lack of charity is added to them. Wheras the halachôt of Moses were a preparation for, but not identical to, the Sacraments and Holidays of the Christian Church.
Thus, the Hebrew Tradition was only a step on the way to the full Christian Tradition. What refuses Christianity or even both Christianity and Jewry, has no genuine tradition at all.
[She wrote:]. . . what I do believe in is: ... and 3. that the Masters are thoroughly versed in the science based on such uninterrupted teaching.
Her masters, certainly no. The Successors of the Apostles have an uninterrupted teaching from Christ. Even those who do interrupt part of the teaching do so with knowledge of this being at variance with earlier teaching. And this is very easy to ascertain, because earlier teaching of the Church was PUBLIC, whereas purported "earlier teaching" of Blavatsky's "masters" (unnamed men who liked secret adulations and detested the light of public inquiry) was up to HPB secret and is thus not consultable.
[She wrote:]H.P.B. is loyal to death to the Theosophical CAUSE, and those great Teachers whose philosophy can alone bind the whole of Humanity into one Brotherhood.
I have no belief that any philosophy of men or any tradition outside the Church can achieve that. Nor do I think that the Church will achieve this fully, since God's truth is not alone in being at work among men, there are also Satan's lies. There will be a false prophet, there will be the beast of the Apocalypse, there will be Harmageddon. This may happen sooner or later as God wills it, whether I say so will not alter the fact, but I do say it in order not to be part of Blavatsky's lies. Not meaning she concocted them, she may have got them from people she thought were masters, but I hold them to be the devil's men. If I name the lies after her, it is because her "masters" have no name. She died before Gurdjieff became one of them.
[She wrote:]there may be those who are starving for truth, in every department of the science of nature, and who consequently are yearning to learn the esoteric views about "cosmology, the evolution of man and of the Universe."
I am certainly not starving for her "truth" or the esoteric views.
I am confident that Earth is in the Centre of the Universe, but I think she accepted the cosmology of Giordano Bruno. I am confident every kind of creature, including man, was created in all essentials as now, except man loosing immortality by the fall and a lot of original lifespan after the Flood. And I do not think at all that that is what she would call "evolution".
And so on, and so forth. Any person accusing me (or, among heterodox, praising me) for being with Blavatsky in any of the respects she mentioned in that document is a liar or a very incompetent judge. It is very incompetent to judge a writer after a poverty which he is living by default rather than chosing for God rather than by what he actually states in his writings.
However, there are things where even Blavatsky is not wrong. Satan is able to make his minions take poison with food, but he is not able to nourish them totally on poison. Satan is able to make his minions believe lies along with truths, but he is not able to make anyone believe only lies and no truths.
Now, if you add the Catechism of Christian Doctrine by St Pius X to a cosmology with spirits in nature like Blavatsky's or if you add it to a cosmology where God is the only spirit in nature and all other spirits belong only to the eternal fate abiding us, like say Descartes' cosmology, I think the former is more correct to what St Pius X actually wrote, the latter is more prone to the errors of atheism.
One may believe in a particular spirit because there is a revelation about him or not because one does not believe that revelation to come from God. In the case of spirits of nature, we have pretty clear indications that they do exist in the Bible.
Our Lord Jesus Christ adressed unclean spirits with wrath. He also adressed waves and storms with an anger because they were annoying His disciples. Hereby I do not mean that He had "learned about nature spirits" by initiation, I mean He knew them from all eternity because He had created them. And same goes for the stars that He adresses (before taking manhood) in Baruch, chapter three and verses around thirtyfive.
Anyone disagreeing with Baruch as not a truly inspired book is reasonably suspect of Judaising, of believing the decisions taken in Jamnia, where the exclusion of the book of Baruch may have been inspired by Sadducees because of these words. He has no right whatsoever to accuse me of Blavatsky's errors because I agree with the book of Baruch.
Nor does this seem to imply any kind of agreement with Blavatskyism or Theosophy, all I have found in their doctrines is that they believe there are planets "around other suns" (whereby they mean stars) and biological beings more technically and spiritually advanced living on those planets. I have not found them agreeing with St Thomas Aquinas and with me or with Tolkien's poetic description of "Anar and Isil" in Silmarillion, that heavenly bodies are lanterns or balls held by angels and moved by them. That I find in Christian tradition, and when Pagan traditions agree, it is the popular ones, not the esoteric ones, that agree most obviously.
"Peter Pan belongs to the world of Peter, not to the world of Pan."
For that matter, Centaurs and Fauns have been found in Egypt according to Sts Paul-the-First-Hermit and Anthony-the-Great. And one aiding their meeting, another weeping for the stupidity of Paganism.
Peter Pan is a made up story, but one that may have true counterparts. Silmarillion is a made up story and one that has a true counterpart, as far as "Anar and Isil" are concerned. As Christians we need have no worry about the Sun being a person or being held as a lantern by a person. He does not seek his own honour from worshippers of Ra (indeed, he went black over them in 1510 before Christ was born, as he went black again over Calvary, when human society and brotherhood of mankind in the Holy Land was even worse than that Pharao). He does not seek his honour or survival from Aztek sunworshippers, he shone on their eyes so that Cortez could win a battle over them, just as he had stood still at the command of Jesus son of Nave, as the LXX render Joshua Ben Nun.** He does not seek to have Christians worship him, but has so far not minded at all when St Francis called him brother or when St Thomas More, calling him "that fellow" said he would be above him.
And if he dislikes bad people (I think he has a special loathing for sunworshippers) he obeys God who told him to shine on the good and on the bad. But if we are getting more cosmic radiation now than before the Flood, I do not believe that to be due to a water canopy before the Flood, but it could be due to the angel of that heavenly body turning on some of the less nice rays on God's order. Of course, God could simply have changed the causality from slower to faster in replacement of cells by new cells or in the gradual deletion of chromosome ends as cells divide within the body. But cosmic radiation pre-flood would also account for the total lack of C14 in some remnants that Flood Geology attributes to creatures living before the flood and dying in it.
That said, Kent Hovind's "pre-flood water canopy" theory has been made out worse than it actually is if you look closely on the rational arguments, namely by his heckler Thunderf00t (thanks to whom I got wind of fact that he is still in prison "for tax fraud").
Hans-Georg Lundahl
Bibl. Audoux, Paris
St Serapion
14-XI-2012
*To be precise: 2957 after the Flood. I had to look it up, I have no photographic memory. But a very good memory for meaning and argument and sometimes for melody and names too.
**I forgot his devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary, except I wondered if he was the angel who painted Our Lady of Guadeloupe. But whether he was or not, we have him "clothing" Our Lady in the Apocalypse that St John received on Patmos and dancing in Her Honour in Fatima of Portugal.
1 comment:
Jamnia revisited.
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