“Nathan the Wise, beneath an appearance of pleading for religious tolerance, depicts a secret, universal religion shared by a world-wide fraternity, a freemasonry, so to speak, of rational men, regardless of their overt cultural and political loyalties, and among Lessing’s last published works were some dialogues on the true nature of Freemasonry itself. Throughout Europe the last two decades before the French Revolution saw a marked growth in the activities of secret soceities devoted to ideals of equality and fraternity, perhaps in response to the restrictions in absolutist states on any general and public participation in political discussion and descision-making, and in Germany the Masonic movement proved particularly attractive to literary intellectuals. Wieland and Herder were both members of the Weimar lodge, named ‘Amalia’, of which the Prime Minister, von Fritsch, was Grand Master, and in 1780 Goethe also applied for membership. Did he expect to find in Masonry a secret company of noble individuals, a broader world than that of the Weimar court, but an alternative to the public mind from which he had turned away? If so, he was soon disapointed. He passed rapidly through the usual grades to become a Master Mason in 1782 and he joined the order within the order, the Illuminists, in February 1783, but within a few weeks he was writing:
They say you can best get to know a man when he is at play… and I too have found that in the little world of the brethren all is as it is in the great one … I was already saying this in the forecourt, and now I have reached the ark of the covenant I have nothing to add. To the wise all things are wise, to the fool foolish.
These were difficult times for German Masonry, as yet not fifty years old. In 1782 a General Assembly in Wilhelmsbad had failed to resolve the complicated internal quarrels of the movement, which was, in essence, divided between those, notably the Rosicrucians, to whom the mythology and ritual of the movement, and its claim to occult knowledge, were more important, and those, notably the Illuminati, who were more concerned with its ethical universalism and social egalitarianism. Goethe, as usual, was steering a middle course, seeing merits in both currents. But in 1784 the Bavarian government discovered, or believed it had discovered, that at the heart of the Illuminist movement lay a radical republican conspiracy, decreed the death penalty for recruiting to it, and warned other German rulers accordingly. In the campaign that followed, and the effectively obliterated German Masonry for twenty years, the Weimar lodge, which Carl August himself had joined in 1782, was one of the first to close. Goethe felt that his knowledge of human behaviour had been extended by his involvement with Freemasonry, and his experiences had an important effect on his later assessment of the causes of the French Revolution, but their immediate contribution to his literary achievment was slight – some forty-eight stanzas of a projected Rosicrucian epic, The Mysteries. Even these were writen, not for the brethren, but for his minimal public of the years 1784-6: Charlotte von Stein, the Herders, and Knebel. Unlike Wieland, or Countess Bernstorff’s secretary, Bode, or the actor-producer Schroder, Goethe does not at any time after his admission seem to have thought the lodge a uniquely important medium through which to communicate with or assist his fellow men. On the contrary, his Masonic comedy of 1790, The Grand Kophta (Der Gross-Cophta), suggests that his original expectations may have been considerably higher, and his disappointment correspondingly more intense, than his cool and tactful assessment of 1783, writen of course to a fellow Mason, might seem to imply.
In that play a young knight expresses the bitterest disilluison when what he has taken to be a brotherhood dedictaed to missionary altruism proves, or seems to prove, to be a cynical deception. What is to become now, he asks, of the unattached idealism of the disapointed friend of humanity? ‘Fortunate he, if it is still possible for him to find a wife or a friend, on whom he can bestow indvidually what was intended for the whole human race.’ These words, almost a prose paraphrase of the last verses of ‘To the Moon’, may be Goethe’s true epitaph on his brief venture into Freemasonry: certainly they tell us something of the nature, as well as the strength, of the emotions with which he turned to Frau von Stein.”
Posted via email from Timothy’s posterous
Israel's Hit Squads | by Yossi Melman and Dan Raviv
in 1994
