Crises of Faith or Doubt and Annie Besant
Catherine Wathen – USA
The nineteenth century, everybody knows, was an age when faith was lost and scientific skepticism came to the fore. It was, after all, the age of Darwin, the saint of faithless skeptics. Yet, what “everybody knows” has been challenged in a recent book by Timothy Larsen: Crisis of Doubt: Honest Faith in Nineteenth-Century England (Oxford University Press, 2006). In this book, Larsen argues that the view of the century of Darwin as a time when faith was on the wane is wrong, or at least incomplete. He cites examples of skeptics who rediscovered faith in traditional religion and maintains that they represent a “crisis of doubt” in the secular values of skepticism.
It is relevant that Timothy Larsen took his first two academic degrees at Wheaton College, a nonsectarian but fundamentalist college in the same town that incongruously harbors the national center of the Theosophical Society in America. Furthermore, he currently holds the Chair of Christian Thought at Wheaton College. Considering the author’s background, the thesis of his book is not much of a surprise.
What is something of a surprise is that one his “reconverts” (skeptics who rediscovered faith in religion) is Annie Besant. It is true that AB was early on an Anglo-Catholic who became a leader of the skeptic movement in England and then rediscovered religious values and practices. However, AB’s rediscovery was not the sort of most of Larsen’s other “reconverts”; she did not go back to conventional Christianity but became an advocate and leading exponent of Theosophy, which is hardly the kind of faith that “Wheaties” (i.e., students of Wheaton College) are encouraged to explore, much less adopt.
In Guru English: South Asian Religion in a Cosmopolitan Language (Princeton University Press, 2006), the author, Srinivas Aravamudan, refers to Theosophy and Theosophists scores of times. Aravamudan is a Professor of English at Duke University who specializes in eighteenth-century British literature. He has, however, family connections with south India, and his education included a time at the Krishnamurti school Brockwood Park in England as well as a bachelor’s degree from Loyola College in Madras (now Chennai).
Not many psychic pioneers have a day in the calendar to mark to mark their memory - 31 March, Hydesville day for the Fox sisters, comes to mind. Another one is Madame Blavatsky, a founder of the Theosophy Society in 1875, who is remembered on the day of her death, 8 May (1891), known as White Lotus Day.
The Wikipedia article on Bright’s disease, a kidney ailment, lists some “well-known victims” of the disease, including “Madame Blavatsky, founder of the Theosophical Society and author of The Secret Doctrine.” Also in the list are Chester Arthur (21st President of the U.S.), Emily Dickinson (the poet), Antonin Dvozák (the composer), H. P. Lovecraft (the fantasy writer), Rowland Hussey Macy (founder of Macy’s Department Store), Linus Pauling (the Nobel laureate chemist), Al Ringling (of Ringling Brothers Circus), and Richard Warren Sears (founder of Sears Roebuck). Thus in this ailment (only one of several, alas, from which she suffered), HPB had some distinguished company. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bright's_disease, Dec. 2008]
Maxim Gorky (1868-1936) has been called the father of Soviet literature and was the founder of the school of socialist realism. However, he had several sides to his personality. From his youth, he combined a love of romantic tales with an intense sympathy for humanity. Of peasant background, he had to be self-educated but eventually became a major supporter of intellectual interests in post-Revolutionary Russia. The culmination of his literary career is his uncompleted four-volume novel, The Life of Klim Samgin. His work combines realism and a strong sense of social justice with a poetic strain of expression.
References to Theosophy often appear in unexpected places. One of those is the following autobiographical account: