MDDM18: Enthusiasts

[Dave Monroe]

"There, over the Evening, he will find, among the
Clientele, German Enthusiasts ..." (M&D, Ch. 30, p.
298)

>From Margaret C. Jacob, Living the Enlightenment:
Freemasonry and Politics in Eighteenth-Century Europe
(New York: Oxford UP, 1991) ...

   "Masonic literature assisted the authorities in
presuming that this British movement possessed
political meaning.  An early and anonymous masonic
treatise of 1738 made this point explicitly and linked
the origin of freemasonry precisely to the English
Revolution...." (p. 27)

"Freemasonry, we are told, began at this 'most famous
of Revolutions' ...." (p. 28)

"At the time of Cromwell its membership was all from
'the sect of the Enthusiasts.'" (pp. 27-8)

   "Masonic oratory extolled religious toleration,
reason, and science, as well as dsicipline and order,
within lodges possessing a constitutional
government....  Within each lodge brothers are
exhorted to build the perfectly harmonious society. 
The masonic utopia can only exist in secular time,
among the prosperous, the meritorious, and the
educated ....  Eventually those excluded from the
lodges were designated as 'strangers' .... 
Eventually, on the Continent these strengers became
known as 'the profane.'" (p. 54)

   "The masonic vision of true wisdom also excluded,
by definition, the private illuminations of the saint
or the mystic.  For the freemason knowledge must be
achieved socially....  the unique insights proclaimed
by the religious enthusiat as a result of his or her
special communication with God are simply irrelevant
....  There is no body of eighteenth-century
literature more systematically at odds with the
religiosity of the seventeenth-century Protestant
sects, or with the piuety of traditional Catholicism,
or with the new Methodism, than that of
freemasonry...." (p. 55)

   "If we survey the religious landscape of
eighteenth-century Britain we begin to see the
distinctive quality of masonic religiosity.  After the
Act of Toleration (1689) there still existed legal
discrimintaion against non-Anglican Protestants;
Catholics and anti-Trinitarians, as well as atheists,
had never been coveredd by the act...  In this context
the masonic insistence upon religous toleration ...
stood in bold contrast to the discrimination impose
against Protestant Dissenters, Catholics and
anti-Trinitarians, by law and custom." (p. 55)

"In the late 1780s acrimony was everywhere
apparent.... a deeply troubled attack on 'the children
of Enthusiasm,' who have appeared in some lodges.... 
The term 'enthusiasm'--in whatever European
language--conjured up ancient fears of religious
sectaries and civil war.  Ironically it will be
exactly the word used against the freemasons by the
earliest opponents of the Revolution." (pp. 212-3)

   "In the final analysis freemasonry, for all of its
exclusivity, secrecy, and gender bias, transmitted and
textured teh Enlightenment, translated all the
cultural vocabularies of its members into a shared and
common experience that was civil and hence political. 
Rather than imagining the Enlightenment as represented
by the politics of Voltaire, or Gibbon, or even
Rousseau, or worse as being incapable of politics, we
might juust as well look to the lodges for a nascent
political modernity.  In them discourses both civic
and enlightened merged and old words like fraternity
and equality took on new meanings, with which in 1789
the whole of the West became suddenly familiar. 
Perhaps we can now undersatnd why opponents of the
French Revolution thought they knew which of their
enemies, among their many enlightened foes, was
obviously to blame for what happened." (p. 224)

Never really stop researching this stuff, so ...

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