SOCIALISM AND MASONRY - Autocracy, despotism and democracy

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Autocracy, despotism and democracy
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bet | 23/46 | Sana | 01.04.2020 | Hajmi | 1,31 Mb. | | #9514 |
45. SOCIALISM AND MASONRY
Very important in this connection is the relationship between Socialism and Freemasonry, which in spite of being banned by both the Orthodox and the Roman Catholic Churches, continued to grow during the nineteenth century, consisting of 26,000 lodges and 1,670,000 adepts by its end.488
In the Anglo-Saxon countries and in Germany, Masonry was theist and antirevolutionary, concentrating on the development of ritual. Thus at a conference of Supreme Councils in Lausanne in 1875, when some of the resolutions were tending in an antichristian direction, the English delegates called for a review of the texts in order to emphasise belief in God and the immortality of the soul. When other delegates rejected such a review, the English left the conference. Only later was their demand satisfied.489
Of course, the theism of Anglo-Saxon Masonry was not theist in a Christian sense. If most of the lower-order Masons considered that "the Grand Architect of the Universe" was simply another name for the Christian God, higher-order Masons knew better. Since 1750, when the Royal Arch degree had been introduced into Masonry, these higher initiates knew that the name of the Masonic god. The Mason Jasper Ridley explains who this is: "In the admission ceremony to the Royal Arch, the initiate is told the name of God, the Great Architect of the Universe. This is one of the most closely guarded secrets of the Freemasons. In recent years they have published many of the secrets that they have guarded for centuries, but not the name of God, which is revealed to the members of the Royal Arch. Renegades from Freemasonry have published it, and it is now generally known that the name is Jahbulon, with the 'Jah' standing for Jehovah, the 'Bul' for Baal, and the 'On' for Osiris.
"The anti-masons have made great play with the masons' worship of Jahbulon. The Egyptian God, Osiris, might be acceptable [!], but the masons' worship of Baal outrages them. The bishops of the Church of England who have become Freemasons are asked to explain how they can reconcile their Christian beliefs with a worship of Baal, who is regarded in the Bible as absolute evil; and these bishops have been very embarrassed by the question."490
There were important practical reasons why the Masonic god should be a syncretist mixture of different gods. Masonry was now spreading to non-European races, and it was desirable that the gods of these races should be given a place within the all-encompassing Masonic deity. Thus English Masonry allowed both Muslims and Hindus into its Indian lodges on the grounds, as the Duke of Sussex ruled, that "the various 'gods' of the Hindus were not separate gods but personifications of characteristics of one central deity". Implicitly, therefore, Krishna and Shiva and Allah were considered to be personifications of the Great Architect no less than Jehovah, Baal and Osiris. The result was, as Ridley writes, that "before the end of the nineteenth century Rudyard Kipling, who was an especially ardent Freemason and was first initiated as a mason in India, was claiming that the religious and racial quarrels which troubled British India disappeared inside the masonic lodges".491
By contrast with Anglo-Saxon Masonry, the Grand Orient in France adopted a more revolutionary and anti-theist stance. Thus when, after the Republican victory in the 1877 general election, the Grand Orient "decided to remove all references to God and the Great Architect [and the immortality of the soul] from their ceremonies, to remove the Bible from their lodges, and to admit agnostics and atheists, this was too much for the English Grand Lodge. The Grand Orient argued that to admit atheists was the final step in the policy of religious toleration which the Freemasons had always supported; but English Grand Lodge broke off relations with the Grand Orient, as did the American Freemasons. The Grand Orient declared that by their action 'English Grand Lodge has struck a blow against the cosmopolitan and universal spirit of Freemasonry'."492
"The victory of universal suffrage, laicism and positivism in the Grand Orient was complete. From now on Masonry became the school and the provider of cadres of the republican party. In general it identified itself with the middle and petit bourgeoisie, who through their elites strove to snatch the administration of the country from the highest-placed social classes, and the history of the Third Republic demonstrates how successful they were."493
The closeness of Continental Masonry and International Socialism is shown by the coincidence of their major congresses. Thus in 1889, on the one hundredth anniversary of the French Revolution, the Grand Orient "created in Paris an international Masonic congress of representatives of the centres in Spain, Italy, Portugal, Hungary, Greece and other states& Almost simultaneously in Paris there took place a representative international socialist congress, which factually speak laid the foundations of the Second Internationale. At the sessions sharp differences were immediately revealed between the revolutionary wing, the reformists and the anarchists, which, however, did not prevent them from taking a series of important decisions. Among the delegates were also Masons: P. Lafargue and L. Dupré (France), A. Costa and E. Malatesta (Italy), D. Neuwenhuis (Holland) and others. It is important to note that from this time a definite synchronicity can be observed in the conducting of the congresses of both organizations, with essentially fairly similar problems being reviewed. It also impossible not to see a definite influence of the order on the Internationale."494
Again, in August, 1900 another international congress of Continental Masonry took place, followed soon after by another congress of the Second Internationale. Many of the delegates to the latter were Masons, including Lafargue (on the revolutionary wing), Costa and Malatesta (from the reformists). "As a result, with some qualifications a resolution was passed in the spirit of reconciliation between labour and capital, which the Masons had long insisted on."495
In 1902 the Continental Masons decided to form an International Bureau of Masonic Links (IBML) in Neuchatel, Switzerland, whose organization was entrusted to the local "Alpina" lodge. Alpina was chosen because of it had official contacts with both the French and Anglo-Saxon lodges, and still retained references to the Great Architect and the immortality of the soul in its constitution. "Although the Bureau, headed by the former Grand Master of the 'Alpina' lodge, Pastor E. Cartier la Tante (1866-1924) sent a circular informing the federations of England, the USA, Germany and their numerous allies of its formation, suggesting that they unite, the latter did not react, and with the exception of the Germans did not take part in the activity of the IBML. However, in, for example, the London Masonic press the position of the United Great Lodge of that country was laid out in some detail. The Bureau was represented as 'the central power' of Masonry having sovereignty, while 'Alpina' was seen as the captive and servant of the Grand Orient of France. In becoming friendly with GOF, which had removed from its rules the reference to the Great Architect of the Universe, Alpina had thereby 'taken a step in an atheist direction' and could not be recognized as a lawful association. As for the other members of the Bureau, they were to be considered as "underground and incorrect great lodges. The accusations had an artificial character, but with some variations they continued for several more long years."496
Masonry was only one aspect of a general spiritual malaise. In 1816 Mary Shelley had published her novel Frankenstein, which expressed a fear not only that science might go off the right path and produce monsters, but that it might reveal that man, like Frankenstein, did not have a soul, but was purely material, so that God did not exist. The rapid growth of science, and the emergence of such atheist theories as Darwinism, accentuated these fears. And certainly, atheist propaganda had considerable success in the period up to 1914 - a success that it has hardly been improved on in succeeding generation. Thus in 1916, writes Alister McGrath, "active scientists were asked whether they believed in God - specifically, a God who actively communicates with humanity, and to whom one may pray 'in expectation of receiving an answer'. Deists don't believe in God, by this definition. The results are well-known: roughly 40 per cent did believe in this kind of God, 40 per cent did not, and 20 per cent were not sure. The survey was repeated in 1997, using precisely the same question, and found pretty much the same pattern, with a slight increase in those who did not (up to 45 per cent). The number of those who did believe in such a God remained stable at about 40 per cent.
"James Leuba, who conducted the original survey in 1916, predicted that the number of scientists disbelieving in God would rise significantly over time, as a result of general improvements in education. There is a small increase in the number of those who disbelieve, and a corresponding diminution in those who are agnostic - but no significant reduction in those who believe."497
However, it was not only "pure" atheism that was the real threat, but antitheism. Most people did not become atheists. More common was the resort to antichristian forms of religion, of which Masonry was one, but by no means the only one.
"The malaise of the late nineteenth century," writes A.N. Wilson, "was not primarily a political or an economic one, though subsequent historians might choose to interpret it thus. Men and women looked at the world which Western capitalism had brought to pass since Queen Victoria had been on the throne - over forty years now! - and they sensed that something had gone hideously awry.
"Gladstone bellowing on the windswept moorlands of Mithlothian; Wagner in the new-built Bayreuth Festival Theatre watching the citadel of the Gods go down in flames; world-weary Trollope scribbling himself to death in the London clubs; Dostoyevsky coughing blood, and thrusting, as he did, his New Testament into the hands of his son - these could hardly be more different individuals. Yet they all at roughly the same moment in history were seized with comparable misgiving. It is like one of these disconcerting moments in a crowd of chattering strangers when a silence suddenly falls; or when a sudden chill, spiritual more than atmospheric, causes an individual to shiver and to exclaim 'I feel as if a man has just walked over my grave.’”498
Christianity "had, by the time of the nineteenth century, begun to stare at its own apocalypse. The biblical scholars of Tübingen had undermined the faith of the Protestant North in the infallibility of Scripture; while the painstaking lifetime of botanical and biological observations of Charles Darwin had shaken the faith of intellectuals in the Creator himself. By the end of the Victorian century, atheism had become the religion of the suburbs, as G.K. Chesterton observed.
"There is no doubt that, as the career and popularity of H.G. Wells demonstrates, unbelief was rife among the masses."499
Masonry combined with a general tendency towards occultism and spiritualism in European and American culture. "The decades before the war," writes Michael Burleigh, "were almost as rich in devotees of occult practices as the 'New Age' is now."500
St. Ambrose of Optina asked: "What is this current spreading of spiritism and the like amongst the educated if not the same demonic delusion? Half of America is now practicing this. How many pastors in Holland have gone mad over it? How many people in Petersburg has the magician Yum drawn into it? And is it not from demonic suggestion that educated people have shaken the faith and good morals of whole generations? Through ignorant people the devil works by ignorance and superstition, but through the educated, by sophisticated means. Did not Voltaire work not a little evil by propagating the evil of unbelief and atheism at the suggestion of the devil?"501
"All these tendencies," wrote Tikhomirov, "while quarrelling and fighting amongst themselves, in essence represent merely separate units of one and the same army.
"The first impulse towards the regeneration of pagan mysticism was given by spiritualism, which first developed in the United States. Perhaps this is linked to the fact that in the 1820s the French Templar order of Freemasonry divided into two parts, one of which, remaining in France, began to decay considerably, while the other moved to America, where, by contrast, it reached a high level of development.
"In any case, already by the end of the 40s of the 19th century, spiritistic 'phenomena' were already abundant in the United States of America, and in 1852 there were up to 30,000 mediums and several million convinced spiritualists. From America spiritualism migrated in 1853 to England, and then to France and Germany, passing everywhere, as V. Bykov says, through one and the same developmental progression. That is, first it would manifest itself in knocks, then in table-levitation, then writing, and finally direct communications [with evil spirits]. This teaching was embraced in Europe even by noted scientists, such as Aragon, Farraday, Tyndal, Chevrel, Flammarion, Kruke, Wallace, Rimman, Tsolner, etc., who first approached spiritualist phenomena with scepticism, but then became ardent followers of spiritualism. In 1858 a certain Hippolyte Rivel, writing under the pseudonym Allan Kardek and with the help of spirits, composed a six-volumed work containing the spiritualist philosophy with a religious-mystical colouring. In the opinion of V. Bykov, it is not possible to establish exactly when spiritualism appeared in Russia, but in any case at the beginning of the 50s of the 19th century, that is, at the same time as the whole of Europe and, moreover, in its mature form (table-lifting, writing and speaking mediumism) and in 'such an epidemic force' that already in 1853 Metropolitan Philaret of Moscow considered it necessary to speak against it. In the 60s the spiritualist movement increased still more in strength. It was also joined here by several eminent scientists and social activists, such as Professor N. Wagner, Professor Yurkevich, Vladimir Dal', the academician Ostrogradsky, Professor Buglerov, etc. A.N. Aksakov was particularly involved in the popularisation of this movement. At the beginning of the 20th century a notable role in the development of our spiritualism was played by Vlad[imir] Pavl[ovich] Bykov, who later spoke out against it and became its untiring opponent.
"At the world congress in Belgium in 1910, the numbers of correctly organised spiritualists, having their own circles and meetings, were calculated at 14,000,000 people, and the numbers of sympathisers who had not yet managed to organise themselves correctly - at 10,000,000."502
And so "the closing decades of the nineteenth, and early decades of the twentieth centuries, saw a deepening interest, among thinking people, in the occult and the dead. Yeats was obsessed with mediums, ouija boards and the like. He was far from being unusual. Arthur Balfour, philosopher and prime minister, was in constant touch with the Other Side, and was in receipt of over 20,000 letters from his dead sweetheart, penned by a spirit medium."503
46. STATE VERSUS CHURCH IN FRANCE
The Dreyfus affair had enormous implications for France, splitting the country in two long after his eventual acquittal. The Jew Bernard Lazare and the left-wing politician Georges Clemenceau led the Dreyfusards, while the writer Charles Maurras and many Catholics and intellectuals sided with their opponents. In 1898 the Catholic monarchist nationalist association Action Française was founded, and in the same year the novelist Emile Zola entered the lists on the side of the Dreyfusards, publishing his famous pamphlet J'accuse.
"J'accuse," writes Alistair Horne, "an open letter to the President of the Republic, dramatically crystallized opinion in Paris. L'affaire was, in the words of Léon Blum, a future prime minister and a Jew himself, then in his twenties, 'a human crisis, less extended and less prolonged in time but no less violent than the French Revolution.' To an English visitor, 'Paris palpitated', and the same man sensed a lust for blood in the air. Divisions created by l'affaire ran all through Parisian society. At cafés 'Nationalists' and 'Revisionists' sat at different tables on opposite sides of the terraces; salons became polarized; Monet and Degas didn't speak for years; Clemenceau fought a duel with an outspoken anti-Semite; six out of seven Ministers of Defence resigned in the course of the scandal."504
Jean Comby writes: "Waldeck-Rousseau, head of government, took steps against those members of religious orders who had become involved in politics, the Assumptionists, and then worked out legislation against the congregations which had grown up without definite legal status. They were upbraided for their political action, their riches, their rejection of human rights, and their influence on some of the youth group whom they made an opposition to Republican youth.
"The law of 9 July 1901, which on the whole was very liberal towards the associations, made an exception of the congregations: they had to obtain special authorization from the Chamber of Deputies or the Senate.
"In 1902 the new head of government, Emile Combes, a one-time seminarian who had become fiercely anti-clerical, turned the law on associations into a militant law. He closed 3000 educational establishments which had not been authorized. In 1903 he caused all requests for authorization to be refused en bloc with the exception of a few missionary congregations. Finally in 1904 he forbade even authorized congregations to do any teaching. The dispersion of the congregations gave rise to some painful scenes, such as the expulsion of the Carthusians. Men and women belonging to religious orders had to shut their schools and return to the lay state, or else go into exile. It was a traumatic experience for them to live in the secular world when they were old and had no resources.
"Anti-clericalism broke out to an unprecedented degree. Outcasts in the administration, teaching and the army, practising Catholics had files opened on them and were kept under surveillance. Processions were attacked, sometimes with loss of life. Saints who had given their names to streets had to make way for heroes of the Republic and of science.
"The Concordat existed, but what did it mean in such a context? A great many small things led to the breaking off of diplomatic relations between France and the Vatican in July 1904. Everything was pointing towards separation. Catholics observed the Concordat for doctrinal and financial reasons. Some supporters of separation wanted to make de-Christianization a machine. Others, in particular the law reporter Aristide Briand, wanted a moderate separation which would burst the abscess of anti-clericalism. The Law of Separation was promulgated on 9 December 1905. It recognized freedom of worship. It recognized freedom of conscience and abolished the budget for worship. The churches' possessions were handed over to administrative religious associations formed by the faithful of the various denominations.
"The Concordat of 1901 was abolished in a unilateral manner because the other signatory, the pope, had not been consulted. Pius X condemned the law for a first time in the encyclical Vehementer (February 1906), and for a second time (August 1906) when forbidding the formation of administrative religious organizations which took no account of the hierarchical organization of the church. Meanwhile, the survey of the churches' possessions had led to violent incidents in some places. Because of its association with them, the church had to abandon seminaries, presbyteries, bishoprics, which were handed over to the community. However, in order not to inflame the situation, the churches and many of the presbyteries were allowed to use the buildings as before and the community was responsible for their upkeep."505
According to John Cornwell, “the French government attempted to control Church property by setting up joint lay-clerical administrative bodies (originally, these were to have included non-Catholic laity). In order to free the Church of any such secular influence, Pius X voluntarily handed over all Church property to the State in France, putting the good of the Church, as he expressed it, before her goods. The French responded by evicting the clergy and religious from their houses and monasteries. The government was determined to exert jurisdictional control over the Church it had set adrift from the State; Pius X was determined to exert untrammeled primacy over the Church as a spiritual, doctrinal, legal, and administrative entity. This was the clear-eyed papal vision of total separation of sovereignties; the Church with the Pope unquestioningly at its head, and the world mediated through the papal diplomatic service and the bishops.”506
As was to be expected, many of the violent attacks on the Church came from the Grand Orient and its affiliates in continental Masonry, which, as we have seen, had been exclusively atheist anti-theist and militantly antichristian since 1877.
Thus in 1881 the Belgian Mason Frély wrote: "Down with the Crucified One! You have already held the world under your yoke for 18 centuries, your kingdom is finished. God is not needed!"507
Again, at the 1902 Convent of the Grand Orient, the Grand Master, Brother Delpeche, expressed this hatred of Christ in a striking form: "The triumph of the Galilean has lasted twenty centuries. In his turn he is dying. That mysterious voice, which once cried: 'Great Pan is dead!' from the mountains of Epirus, is today proclaiming the end of that deceiving God who had promised an age of peace and justice to those who would believe in him. The illusion has lasted long enough; but the lying God is disappearing in his turn; he is going to take his place, amidst the dust of the ages, with those other divinities of India, Egypt, Greece and Rome, who saw so many deluded creatures prostrate themselves before their altars. Freemasons, we realise, not without joy, that we ourselves are no strangers to this downfall of false prophets. The Church of Rome, based on the Galilean myth, began to decline rapidly from the very day on which the Masonic association was established. From a political point of view, Freemasons have often differed among themselves. But at all times Freemasonry has stood firm on this principle - to wage war against all superstitions and against all forms of fanaticism."508
Again, in 1913 the Convent of the Grand Orient of France declared: "We no longer recognise God as the aim of life; we have created an ideal which is not God, but humanity."509
The Freemasons "were so closely associated with the Radical Party," writes Ridley, "that some of them tended to look askance at Socialists who wished to become Freemasons. After the French Socialist Party, the SFIO, was formed in 1905, there were applications from Socialists who wished to join. Despite the objections of these old Radical Party hacks, the Grand Orient agreed to admit Socialists, and lowered the admission fees and the subscription which had previously been too high for members of the working class who would have liked to join. At the beginning of the twentieth century several prominent Socialists - Jean Longuet, Jean Monnet, Roger Salengro, and Vincent Auriol - were Freemasons; but the two greatest French Socialists of the twentieth century, Jean Jaurès and Léon Blum, were not.
"Many schoolteachers were Freemasons, and often came into conflict with the local Catholic priest. In 1910 the Catholics were complaining that at least 10,000 schoolteachers were Freemasons. The army and the Church continued to regard the Freemasons as a subversive organization."510
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