FREEMASONRY

Freemasonry

Freemasonry

Introduction

Freemasonry is an international network of fraternal organizations that took their modern form in the 1710s through the 1720s and became tightly associated with the philosophical developments and social reforms of the eighteenth century. Many of the philosophers and statesmen of the Enlightenment and the American Revolution are known to have been Freemasons, including baron de Montesquieu, Voltaire, Frederick II, Claude-Adrien Helvétius, Benjamin Franklin, and George Washington; and many others have long been thought to have been. Freemasonry was an important vehicle for the transmission of the aspiration to build a civil society on the basis of non-sectarian, non-dogmatic rationality, philosophy, and moral improvement. Later, it became a perennial target for opponents of rationalistic enlightened philosophy and its presumed progeny, especially the American and French Revolutions.

Discussion

At the end of the 17th and the beginning of the 18th centuries, there was a slow transformation of practical Freemasonry (that of the cathedral builders, for example) into a speculative Freemasonry—trowels, squares, and compasses became merely symbols, and, in the lodges, artisans were replaced by the bourgeoisie and aristocrats. The founding of the Great Lodge in London (1717), which was quickly followed by the first lodges on the continent, marks the birth of "modern" Freemasonry (although some authors posit an earlier Jacobite Freemasonry, that of the partisans of the Catholic Stuart dynasty). By 1723, English Freemasonry was armed with James Anderson's famous constitutions, which remain the essential reference text for "regular" Freemasonry. Anderson, a Presbyterian pastor, composed them at the encouragement of Jean-Théophile Désaguliers, an Anglican priest who was the son of a French Huguenot pastor. One article of the constitutions that is as famous as it is controversial deals with the religious duties of the Freemason. "A Mason," Anderson wrote, "by virtue of his state, is obliged to obey moral law, and if he has a good understanding of the Art [of Freemasonry], he will never be a stupid atheist or an irreligious libertine. Just as Masons, in early times, were obliged to profess the religion of whatever country in which they lived, regardless the religion, it is today considered appropriate to subject them only to that Religion upon which all men are in agreement, and to leave to each his own opinions. This consists in being good, sincere men of honor and probity, in whatever denomination or specific belief they might distinguish themselves."

This text is deceptive. According to the interpretation it is most often given, Masonic tolerance concerns only the followers of the revealed religions and excludes all atheists, not just "stupid atheists." Whatever the case, it is clear that Freemasonry regardless where it erected its columns—in the British Isles, on the continent, or across the Atlantic—remained fundamentally deistic during the Enlightenment, despite the agnostic tendencies that were characteristic of the rationalism of the Age of Enlightenment. Current historical research suggests that freemasonry developed directly out of Scottish and English stonemason guilds—that is, the craft guilds of practicing masons. Stonemasons as craftsmen were well-versed in geometry and mathematics, and master masons practiced ...