FREEMASONRY

FREEMASONRY. 1) In eighteenth-century Russia: Origin of the Freemasons seems to go back to a twelfth-century English religious brotherhood formed to guard trade secrets. It has a varied history in different countries, sometimes professing an undoctrinal Christianity (England, Germany) and at other times being openly hostile to religion and the Church (France, Italy, Latin countries). In the 18th c. English Freemasonry embraced Deism, and from here (and other Western countries) it came to Russia during the reign of Tsarina Elizabeth, burgeoning under Catherine II. Members-the educated gentry in St. Petersburg, Moscow, and some provincial towns-numbered approximately twenty-five hundred.

At this time in Europe Voltairianism was a spiritual and moral disease among those converted to Western values due to its complete lack of spiritual concentration and the moral bankruptcy that accompanied it. Two trends in Freemasonry addressed deficiencies in this Enlightenment culture. One was mystical, focusing on meditation and self-perfection. The other was ethical/social, reaching out to the world in education and publishing. The latter was centered on the University of Moscow and Nicholas Novikov, 1744–1818, Catherine’s most active publicist. The Moscow Rosicrucian group became the most influential of the Russian centers, adding mystical and ascetical elements to disciplines of the lower forms of Freemasonry. The “occult sources” of Romanticism were derived from the higher levels of Freemasonry, and it shared with Romanticism a feeling of world harmony and anthropocentric self-awareness. Both trends, the mystical and ethical/social, are aspects of human nature that the Age of Reason could not adequately express.

As far as Russia was concerned, the newly educated converts to the Western European spirit became true Western bureaucrats, understanding their existence in terms of their utility to the state, where they were placed on Peter I’s “Table of Ranks” (a fourteen-step government table of civil servants). This psychologically prepared and confirmed for them the many stepped ascent of the Masonic Orders. With the revolutionary character of the Enlightenment showing itself on the continent, Catherine the Great-clearly to safeguard the government and the wealthy-put an abrupt end to ideas and people that represented its ideals, among them the Masons. Nonetheless, a few scholars have seen the inspiration for and continuation of the movement in the later Slavophiles (q.v.).

2) In the United States today: In recent history the Orthodox experience of Freemasonry has largely been socioeconomic. Newly arrived immigrants consider that they have “made it” when they belong to a knife-and-fork business club, just like other successful Americans. The Church has not officially encouraged membership in Freemasonry due to the fact that at its higher levels, or degrees, it has a separate theology that is not in agreement with Orthodoxy (q.v.). Many clergy have spoken out against the Masons and reminded their people of the official condemnations issued by the Church from time to time in different countries-condemnations that were not de facto binding on the American Orthodox population. In some United States contexts even members of the clergy joined the Masons. If the socioeconomic theory is correct, the phenomenon in immigration will probably die its own silent death.