On hearing that Professor Margaret Jacob’s seminal The Radical Enlightenment - Pantheists, Freemasons and Republicans was now appearing in a revised second edition, Freemasonry Today sent me along to her for an exclusive tutorial.
    Margaret Jacob showed me into her study; its book collection would match a medium-sized town library for size: being there was, for me, to sit at the feet of the first mainstream academic to describe Freemasonry’s historical role.
    I suggested that The Radical Enlightenment had significant autobiographical connotations. Her smile gave way to protective laughter.
    ‘My mother came from Northern Ireland. I was sent to Roman Catholic parochial school and undergraduate college. I had seen much in my youth that I didn’t like and by graduation time it was not for me. I edited an underground college magazine which we named The Lutheran and I guess that showed my thoughts and feelings. It was unusual at that time for a secular graduate school to recruit from Roman Catholic colleges, as those institutions were mainly regarded as inferior. I was the first from a Roman Catholic women’s college to be accepted into Cornell’s Department of History. Sectarianism has always struck me as a blight on humanity.’

Isaac Newton: Drunk with God

I wanted her to take me on a path of enlightenment from Newton’s Principia to Anderson’s Constitutions; the start was most disappointing. ‘There is no evidence that Newton was a Freemason - not a shred.’ Perhaps for some of us, the hope persists that evidence might yet turn up.
    ‘Newton was drunk with God. About thirty-five percent of the hundred thousand manuscript pages that he left were theological, largely prophetic, millenarian and apocalyptic analyses. He was an Arian, not accepting the doctrines of either the Trinity or the deity of Jesus. In common with the radical Protestants of the mid-century Revolution, he believed that the fourth century codification of Christianity was a corruption for the benefit of state and church. Because of this, he could not sign up to the Thirty-Nine Articles and obtained a dispensation to continue at Cambridge without the benefit of Holy Orders.
    ‘Despite this heterodoxy we know from private papers that Newton believed that force was the will of God operating between the planets in the universe. Space and time were fixed entities; space was the sensorium of God but He was separate from creation, its creator and controller. Newton did represent Cambridge in Parliament during 1688-9, supporting the royal succession from Stuart (Jacobite) to the House of Orange. Also I believe that he supported the 1689 Act prescribing religious tolerance. Thus the Revolution in England determined that the two potential absolutists, church and state, would be subordinated to Parliament – constitutionalised.’

John Theophilus Desaguliers, Grand Master

Recovering from this, I suggested that even though Newton himself may not have been a Freemason, many of his circle were. Margaret Jacob agreed, ‘Desaguliers arrived in England as an infant Huguenot refugee. The story is told that the ship from France was so overcrowded that the baby Desaguliers, Grand Master of England in 1719 was towed alongside in a bucket. The Huguenots were bitter and angry people. At the hands of an absolutist state and Church they had suffered a dispossession comparable with that of Jews in 1930s Europe. The Desaguliers of the world were “joiners”, “meeters and greeters” and, for John Theophilus, this included Anglicanism, Freemasonry, the Whig Party and the Royal Society. Multi-talented, he was absorbed in the intellectual excitement of his period at Oxford - the Newtonian Revolution in its many forms. He was a busy man, lecturing, building Freemasonry, building the Whig Party and Chaplain to the Duke of Chandos and his Estate. I think I read somewhere that he had a lot of children. There are copies of strong letters to him from Chandos complaining of failing in spiritual duties, even to the extent of leaving a body for burial unattended for some hours during the heat of the day!’
    ‘I believe that Newtonian science and the Revolution’s new freedom suggested a new spirituality – it in turn presaged new social forms for its realisation. And, at least in part, the new spirituality was provided under the mantle of Freemasonry. It became a new social nexus that was tolerant of most religious forms, gave expression to new ideas, new order and new rituals. The imagination was captured, a new temple in which everyone, regardless of religion, could express a new understanding of God as a Great Architect of the universe.’

Religious toleration

I suggested to her that Freemasonry seemed to over-arch religions and represented a vehicle for the implementation of the Act of Toleration. She agreed, indicating that Freemasonry extended the toleration of the Act, yet supported and extended the centre of a liberal Anglicanism. We then touched on politics!
    ‘The use of the term “constitution” as a set of rules, sprang up in England with various new social groupings that characterised the 1650s. As antiquity was greatly respected, groups sought to demonstrate their longevity – perhaps the newer the group the further back it went! This rise of constitutions itself gave rise to the possibility that human affairs could be governed in this rule-bound way. Therefore, for masonic groups to be effective and to be able to disseminate their shared values, it was appropriate that they should unite under a constitution. After 1689 these shared values would include religious tolerance and support for constitutional monarchy, in this case the Hanoverian succession. French aggression was still feared, as was a possible Jacobite resurgence - the Revolution had to be protected. Freemasonry was a bulwark, in a fraternal convivial unity of all those with centrist persuasion, to protect the freedoms won by the Revolution.’
    Margaret Jacob made it clear to me that the Newtonian Revolution was a framework, a template, to enable the understanding of nature as something that followed laws. That this was adopted by Freemasonry is demonstrated in the ritual and the reply to the question, ‘When were you made a mason?’ The answer requires the candidate to believe that the earth orbits the sun – a view proscribed by one major authority and for which it had burned people at the stake.
    Building upon this, Freemasonry’s framework and template was that human life was like nature, it was something that could follow laws and constitutions. That is why Freemasons were actively supportive of making both Church and Crown constitutional and placing them under parliamentary rule. To challenge the divine right of kings is one thing, challenging the divine right of the Church may be challenging divine right altogether!
    In this we have the celestial and terrestrial; the kingly pillar and the priestly pillar conjoined by a lintel to provide stability. This could be understood as placing freemasonry at the interface of the individual and the universal; the particular and the general. Surely this connection is a unified holism and is the historical origin and explanation for masonry’s spiritual component?
    Despite a common origin in the English revolutions of the seventeenth century, English Freemasonry was not the place for religious or political extremes, and so the radical and pantheist Freemasons largely took their Freemasonry to the Continent. Margaret Jacob’s thesis can perhaps be characterised as follows: until 1789, when the Freemasons were blamed for the French Revolution, the eighteenth century is to be regarded in terms of their contribution. It can, uniquely, be regarded as Freemasonry’s Century.
    To believe that Freemasonry can be separate from its cultural milieu is naïve. The forget-me-not reminds us of that. Perhaps the important and continuing changes in Freemasonry during the last few years could be regarded as evidence of Freemasonry’s aspiration for the twenty-first century to become another Freemasons’ Century.

Freemasonry Today is very grateful to Professor Margaret Jacob for the meeting, for extending its duration threefold!

PROFESSOR MARGARET JACOB
Professor Jacob was the first non-masonic academic to promote Freemasonry as a major theme of academic research. Her book on the influence of Freemasonry in the Enlightenment, The Radical Enlightenment, first appeared in 1981 and it is fair to say that most academics who know about Freemasonry and its historical influence do so as a result of her work. Her work has also been the most important recent factor in the changing appreciation of the origins and effect of the eighteenth century ‘Enlightenment’: a period of great social and scientific advance.