Editorial and Prospectus
OF N. 1 - 2018 OF CRITICA MASSONICA
(English Version by Christopher Sicurella)
CRITICA MASSONICA is part of today's network of Masonic cosmopolitanism, just like an intercontinental communicational network connected Masons of many countries and many backgrounds in the 18th century. The latter was an unconscious project of incontrovertible universalism that was not in the minds of the founders. These founders could think of everything in terms of universal morality, but not to constitute a relational relationship of this magnitude.
Masonic collective thinking, without necessarily wanting to find a common synthesis, is a possibilistic prerequisite. From the first decades of the eighteenth century, this thought was a search for the collective recognition of ideals and hopes in a future of happiness for humanity, in an imaginable utopia but always intruded with possibilities. This was the expectation of the individual Masons, even if the Masonic institutional structures tended to separate, distinguish and overlook the other, so that the history of Freemasonry can be understood as a conflict of history with Marx's good peace. It is then necessary to distinguish between the expectations of the Masons, those of institutionalized Freemasonry and those of Freemasonry as a movement of thought. In the intercultural and international mechanism of cosmopolitanism, the subjects acting more than the Masonic institutions were the individual Masons who, through correspondence, books and travels (cultural or commercial Grand Tours), explored Masonic Europe by elaborating more or less consciously a thought towards unity and to seeking a tradition. It can then be said that these individual Masons were characterized not as individuals, but as historical subjects, subjecting the individuality and creating, not so unknowingly, a new historical reality that continued an ancient past. 16th and Freemasonry occupied a wider space of communication than scientists had been colonizing by private and public correspondence journals with private magazines and meetings at institutional and private venues in academies, lounges and meeting venues.
Scientists and Masons from the 18th century gave concurrence at McLuhan's principle that "the medium is the message". The rational or irrational Masonic mind that was extending into space as an expanding body and the only limit was given by time: the time it took to get a book published in another country, the time it took for a letter to reach the recipient but a time that's perception was then narrowed: A letter that came from Italy to England in twenty days, aroused amazement. But it was fragmented and asistemic communication. The printing press first allowed broader distribution to a broader audience by enhancing human expression skills. The medium, a book printed in many copies in a short time, compared to manual copying, became a message in itself because it conveyed the knowledge in a reliable way without the pernicious dangers of oral transmission. The international Masonic community made its message the medium; the means used to communicate not only enlivened it but also made it real and cohesive. It could be said that if one thought that the dusty library parchment upheld civilization, now in the 18th century, the long century of Freemasonry, it was the correspondence and the dust on the diligences that carried it.
Three hundred years later we see that today with voracious speed the communication tools are disconcerting compared to even only fifty years ago. One writes to a friend from Milan to Beijing and two or three seconds later he receives the message. But every step forward creates its own problems. Someone with ingenious thought has perceived the potentialities of the need to communicate in a reality that tends to geographic and psychological isolation and social networks, a global communication tool, have emerged. But as on a public forum you can talk to Socrates, in the same forum we are scared of old men.
With his humiliating verve, Umberto Eco said in June of 2015: "Social media gives the right to speak to legions of imbeciles who first spoke only at the bar after a glass of wine without harming the community. They were immediately silenced, while they now have the same right to speak of a Nobel Prize. It's the invasion of the imbeciles. TV had promoted the host of the village with respect to which the viewer felt superior. The Internet drama is that it has promoted the imbecile of village to look like the bearer of truth."
One should however not think of the web to be an indiscriminate meeting place for imbeciles only. Those who know how to search find highly specialized sites, sites often reserved for those who have academic titles, a bit like the "esoteric" (reserved) ancient academies or can find sites of high culture where they gather relevant studies and writings importance on particular themes. Within the vast online masonic publications, many prestigious Masonic magazines and blogs are found. It is a vast space in which Critica Massonica is to be inserted with a modern cosmopolitan breath by publishing articles in various languages: Italian, English, French, German, Spanish and Portuguese.
Papers and Book-Review
Pierre-Yves Beaurepaire wrote a substantial article for Critica Massonica about the development of the 'Tradition' in Freemasonry. With this unprecedented publication, the author illustrates that any discussion about the Tradition of Freemasonry can't ignore the research on its very origins.Various cultural, literary, antiquarian, scientific, religious and ideological currents stirred the European cultural world, making sure that from the seventeenth century onwards the two concepts of Tradition and Origin intertwined with heterogeneous results concerning to the movement of Masonic thought that was spreading with an exponential acceleration from England to the whole of Europe. Masonic thought and the theses of the origin of Freemasonry were therefore disparate making it difficult today to untangle them. However, all these theses could be traced back to a single logic that characterized a typical historical development of the eighteenth century and which was based on three assumptions: the logic of the linear development of historical events exhibited with a rigid chronology of facts for which each one is the cause of the subsequent one; the reformist Christian approach that reads history by taking the Bible as the Book of Human History; the Greek-Latin way of thinking for which an idea was right and true because it was claimed by ancient and eminent authors. The aim of the early Masons was therefore that of « établir une histoire " positive " de l'ordre » and to operate historically « entre deux traditions, cell des annales et cella des chroniques.» These assumptions were translated, and in some ways still used by certain pseudo-historical Masons, in the creation of a system of pseudo-mythologems for which those imageries take on the role of mythical figures, in the understanding of Kàroly Kerényi. Ultimately the birth of Freemasonry shows itself as an impetuous attempt to create a « capital symbolique prestigieux, à s'inscrire dans une tradition d'excellence », an invented tradition. This cumbersome ideological whole is further complicated by the need of the founders of the Premier Grand Lodge to seesaw between the political problems and the British dynastic conflicts at the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in anxious research of a state-wide recognition of this new association.
Yves Hivert-Messeca's article at first glance would seem the umpteenth excursus into Masonic history - but it is not. Yves Hivert-Messeca's article demystifies (desacralizes?) many clichés that revolve within the Masonic world. The martially striking themes of tolerance, equality, brotherhood, freedom, universal morality do not withstand the critical eye of the historian. Freemasonry as a futuristic utopia is made of men with their virtues and vices. Hivert-Messeca shows these vices in his sharp synthesis. Virtues are the ideal colliding with reality and, as in the Pirandello comedy "The Pleasure of Honesty", virtue must always come to terms with the everyday life. Even Lessing had denounced 200 years ago the incestuous relationship between the civil world and the Masonic world. The Masonic "vices" are therefore for Hivert-Messeca the preconceptions, the prejudices, the exclusions that separate the mason from the "other", the other being rejected by cultural, social and religious stereotypes (the list is not short), vanquishing the conceptions of primacy of universality and also the idea that there is an unchanging traditional thought in the Masonic world as expressed in James Anderson's Constitutions.
For integration we have added an Yves Hivert-Messeca's article of that is a sort of linguistic clarification of many words and Masonic concepts by also affirming some essential points in the history of Freemasonry, with delineations of references to the "ancient duties" of medieval corporations and in a special paragraph the historical inconsistency of the old thesis of continuity between medieval corporations and Masonic lodges. Many of its synthetic historical details spare many "legends" of the fantastic history of Freemasonry as it is embedded in many lodges, especially regarding the historical meaning of the Constitutions of Freemasonry.
This is a document of the Constitutions that had troubled the vicissitudes in the Masonic institutional reality that Pere Sánchez Ferré exposes to the Masonic language of Spanish language, demonstrating how the Masonic "Old Charges" dictated by the founders of Freemasonry have been freely interpreted in Hispanic countries for reasons exogenous and endogenous, creating new modes of tradition, emphasizing the thesis that instead of Masonic tradition one should speak of the many traditions in Freemasonry. The sometimes spasmodic search of origins and a Masonic tradition not only leads to questionable research, such as Lessing's on Arthurian Knights or De Ramsay's Order of Knights of the Hospital of Saint John of Jerusalem, not forgetting the antiquarian ambitions of a druidic origin as John Montagu wanted those of James Anderson's bible. The latter in the Protestant cultural and religious climate led to the creation of the legend of Hiram being the architect of the Temple of Salomon and rituals based on biblical culture such as the Royal Arch. A lot has been said about their ritual but seldomly in a sound manner. Yasha Beresiner reconstructs the story of the Royal Arch illustrating the issues that this ritual with its grades first created in English Masonry, problems that slowed the diplomacy of Antients and Moderns both projected into a peaceful unification. Beresiner, proposing his writing, wrote to us asking us a question: "Royal Arch in England from a Craft Perspective" Would you consider the Royal Arch as a 'Masonic Tradition'? Maybe we misfigured it, but the question seemes like typical English humor or veiled irony.
Instead, there is no humor or irony in the important article by (Sr.) Anne Eckerle and Hans Koller, two senior members of German Freemasonry. A precise, historically unobtrusive study that, with the intellectual honesty of true Masons, breaks many mystifications about the history of Freemasonry and its relations with the world of politics. In Freemasonry, tradition is not based on fantasies but on reality, even though raw and bloody; witnessed also by German Masons. These are issues and situations that many people do not like to bring to memory. A study that gives a sense of anguish. Our editor Fr. Christopher Sicurella wrote an English summary of the script.
Francesco Angioni, resuming Hobsbawm's thesis (but also accredited by other authors) points to the so-called Masonic tradition invented by the 17th century Proto-Masorny and codified in the Constitutions of Freemasons of 1723 and 1738, critically rethinking the Masonic (?) archetypes of brotherhood, freedom, equality and morality as well as in the first English Constitutions were declared and that today they have sometimes taken deviant meanings from tradition.
In a Spanish translation we present the article by Andrew Prescott and Susan Mitchell Sommers which caused great discomfort in the masonic world since it was presented at the Tercentenary Conference about the History of Freemasonry at Queen's College, Cambridge, 9-11 September 2016 and published in 'Reflections on 300 Years of Freemasonry' by QCL, Ed. JS Wade in 2017. The two authors of this well documented article contest the date of birth of the Premier Grand Lodge in 1717, moving it to four years later. This is not the first revolution in traditional Masonic historiography, other examples are known as the birth of Freemasonry in Scotland instead of England, the formation of the Prince Hall, the historical continuity between medieval guilds and the masonic lodges, the Templar origin of Freemasonry or, for Italy, the revolutionary Masonic activism in the Risorgimento and others. What is interesting is that these historical analyzes based on accurate documentation are produced by "profane" academic historians, not Masons. In particular, France offers studies of "review" of some previously untouchable presuppositions of Masonic history, unlike the British world that does not seem to offer rigorous analysis by addressing critical issues with a spirit of adventure. Not a few think that the historians among the Masons operating in the Grand Lodges, except for rare cases such as Roger Dachez and some thers, are bound by a kind of self-censorship in addressing some issues that violate the non-questionable beliefs that have been perpetuating for three hundred years and that would risk to upset the traditional cultural structures of the international Grand Lodges, especially those related to the British culture.
The young and promising Brazilian researcher Felipe Côrte Real De Camargo addresses the topic of Masonic regularity through international relations between Masonic bodies. Analyzing the relationship between the United Grand Lodge of England and the Grand Orient of Brazil illustrates how different criteria of the concept of "regularity" are being built, applied and modified in the course of history and national contexts. In practice it seems that as tradition is passing "from mouth to ear" at least in Freemasonry the words, phrases and concepts change which is well demonstrated by today's scientific research and experimentation on human communicational transmission.
In the last minute we added a 2014 interview of the famous historian Alain Bernheim about the concept of "Masonic regularity". An interview in which Bernheim, who does not belong to any lodge or Grand Lodge, expresses lucid and courageous ideas on the subject.
We have received two interesting articles by Yasha Beresiner and Roger Dachet on particular aspects of Freemasonry which we have included in:
Editor
Francesco Angioni