Theosophy would not have emerged as a widespread global phenomenon in the nineteenth century had its ascendancy not also coincided with the growing appeal of scientific monism as one of the most potent challenges to Christianity's body-soul dualism. Theosophy, like other alternative religious movements that gathered momentum in the nineteenth century as the crisis of faith grew, constituted a heterodox response to the monochromatic character of mainstream religion, refusing both the authoritarian certainties of dogmatic theology and the materialism of secular reason. With roots in an eclectic blend of Renaissance Neoplatonism, Kabbalism, and Christian and Jewish mysticism, Theosophy nonetheless maintained an intense engagement with nineteenth-century science. Its self-positioning between science and religion grew out of Theosophy's interventions in the debates over mind and matter, which pitted the monistic view that mind is matter against Christianity's body-soul dualism. The historical convergence between Theosophy and monism may seem to contradict Theosophy's long-standing identification with the vocabulary of spirituality and Indian mysticism, which the arch theorist of monism Ernst Haeckel derided for its arcane superstition and self-deluded otherworldliness. When Helena Petrovna Blavatsky and Annie Besant, writing from their newfound home in India, honed their intellectual strategies to combat the hegemony of mainstream Christian doctrine, they knew that their primary obstacle lay in Christianity's promise of redemption through Christ's resurrection, signifying the ultimate triumph over bodily death. Challenging Christianity without rejecting its core premise of a salvific afterlife---the ethical motor of this-worldliness---locked Theosophy into a dualistic worldview from which it struggled to escape. Theosophy's bind threatened to compromise its dogged commitment to evolutionary theory, not redemptory promise, as the explanatory framework for human development.
...MoreBook Weir, Todd H. (2012) Monism: Science, Philosophy, Religion, and the History of a Worldview.
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