The Canonbury Masonic Research Centre held its sixth international conference which drew speakers from the United Kingdom, Ireland, France, Italy, Sweden, Hungary and Bulgaria. John Hamill, Director of Communications of the United Grand Lodge of England, began with a paper entitled ‘Freemasonry and Religion -- the English view’.
    He cited the Grand Lodge’s longstanding policy on religion which can be traced back to the first charge of the 1723 Constitutions. Accordingly, regular Freemasonry is defined as ‘neither a religion in itself nor a substitute for religion’ but a great supporter of it. However, there have been many attacks levelled at the Craft by those who have objected to it on religious grounds and although such attacks were quite rare in England their number did rise quite markedly in the second half of the twentieth century.
    Colin Bissell spoke about the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Geoffrey Fisher (1887-1972). In 1945 Fisher was appointed Archbishop of Canterbury and it was in this capacity that he officiated at the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in June 1953 and later became the first head of the Church of England since the Reformation to pay an official visit to the Pope in Rome. He was also an enthusiastic Freemason and Grand Lodge Officer who strove to embody the teachings of the Craft, not least in his capacity as President of the World Council of Churches from 1946 to 1954.
    Historian of Gnosticism, Tobias Churton, presented a paper ‘Heretical or revolutionary? Anderson’s Constitutions, 1723-1738’, which examined the phrase in the 1723 Constitutions: ‘to that religion in which all men agree’. Some commentators, he noted, have taken this statement to mean that Freemasonry was disposed to Deism or even Natural Religion. While Churton believed that English Freemasonry was innocent of advocating a form of Natural Religion it was probably guilty of promulgating a kind of Newtonian religion, one which reflected the world view of a number of the early members of Grand Lodge. After the demise of these early masonic pioneers, ‘the Craft lost its original driving impulsion’, Churton lamented, ‘leaving a legacy of confusion which persists to this day.’
    Dr. Yuri Stoyanov of the School of Oriental and African Studies, London University, spoke on the relationship between Freemasonry and the Orthodox Church in both Eastern Europe and the Middle East. Dr. Stoyanov explained that comparatively little work had been done in this area in recent years partly due to the rise of nationalism and partly due to a marked increase in anti-Masonic polemics. However, he was optimistic that this would soon change as fresh archival material, previously inaccessible to researchers, has become available.
    Professor Antonio Panaino of the University of Bologna then delivered a fascinating paper on Zoroastrianism and Freemasonry. ‘Zoroastrianism is one of the oldest religious traditions in the world’, he explained. Zoroastrianism exists primarily in Iran and India - where they are known as Parsis - and during the period of Western colonialism in India their communities were exposed to new ideas and practices. The ‘sociability of Freemasonry and the ideal of universal brotherhood’ had ‘a seminal impact on the Parsis’, in turn, ‘the intellectual contribution of the Parsis to the development of Indian Freemasonry was very important’. Sadly in Iran, following the Islamic revolution of 1979, the Zoroastrians were reduced to being a ‘significant minority’ while Freemasonry was simply outlawed and a number of its adherents were executed.
    The first day was ended with a paper by the Revd. Neville Barker Cryer who spoke about Mormonism and Freemasonry. The Mormons’ teachings and practises are ‘very largely based on eighteenth-century American masonic tradition’ he informed the delegates. Not only was Joseph Smith and several other founders of the movement Freemasons but so too were their successors. Remarkably the Mormons’ sacred books and practices were so heavily influenced by masonic ritual and practices that the Church actually prohibited its members from joining masonic lodges, ‘lest they should discover the many striking similarities’.

The Catholic Church and Freemasonry

    Robert Gilbert began day two with a comprehensive overview of the frequently stormy relationship between the Roman Catholic Church and Freemasonry. Following the publication of the first Papal Bull by Pope Clement XII in April 1738, several encyclicals were published prohibiting Catholics from joining lodges on pain of excommunication. But as Gilbert pointed out although the Church was, for a long time, hostile towards Freemasonry, the hostility was not reciprocal; regular masonic lodges have always welcomed Roman Catholic members. Today the current edition of Canon Law (1984) no longer mentions Freemasonry, the ruling being that as long as the masonic organisation in question is not hostile towards the Roman Church individual Catholics are at liberty to seek membership if they so wish.
    Professor Cecile Revauger of the University of Bordeaux discussed the early English Grand Lodge policy of forbidding discussion of religious or political matters within its lodges which she stressed was necessary if the new organisation was to assuage the State and the established Church of England. Ironically, although English Freemasonry maintained close ties with the Anglican Church during the eighteenth century, lodges also provided non-sectarian havens for a variety of dissenters who were otherwise barred from holding high civil or military office by virtue of the Test and Corporation Acts passed during the reign of Charles II and which were not fully repealed until 1829.
    David McCready, of the Irish School of Ecumenics, looked at the ‘Theology’ contained in the Emulation ritual, a ritual child of the union of two Grand Lodges in 1813. He pointed out that the ritual made reference to God no less than fifty-three times and that it appears to mirror ‘the theology of Jesus’ in the Synoptic Gospels. Indeed, one might ‘give a "masonic" reading to the New Testament and see Jesus Christ as the Master Mason par excellence, the Builder and Constructor of a New and Perfect Temple.’

Religious background of Freemasonry

    Trevor Stewart, the current Prestonian Lecturer, then spoke at length on the eighteenth-century Freemason and writer, William Hutchinson FSA (1732-1814), who was the Master of the former Lodge of Concord in Barnard Castle, County Durham, several times in the 1770s. Hutchinson was a country attorney, a local manorial land steward, a parish vestryman at his local church, and an antislavery propagandist in the theatre. However, it was as a masonic writer that Hutchinson is chiefly remembered today. His work The Spirit of Freemasonry first made it into print in 1775 and it immediately won the imprimatur of the Grand Lodge in London; it also proved immensely popular. As Stewart explained, Hutchinson’s views on the religious underpinning of Freemasonry cannot be viewed in isolation but rather set against the backdrop of the European Enlightenment.
    Dr. Henrik Bogdan, from the University of Gothenburg, lectured on how certain mystery traditions have influenced the development of Freemasonry, specifically the Kabbalah, on the development of the Master Mason degree. A number of early masonic catechisms and pamphlets bear the unmistakable traces of a quest - the search for the master’s word. Dr. Bogdan highlighted how this was remarkably similar to the Kabbalistic quest of attempting to discover the true name of the Most High, a tradition that derives from the mystical Jewish text, The Zohar. Dr. Bogdan also noted how many early masonic documents specifically mentioned the Kabbalah.
    The closing presentation was by Dr. Robert Peter of the University of Szeged, Hungary, who argued that there has been a tendency ‘to overemphasise the Newtonian, deistic and secular aspects of masonic ideology at the expense of the mythic, hermetic and religious aspects’ and it was precisely this curious mix of apparently contradictory strains that distinguished masonic lodges from other associations in the Enlightenment. As such Freemasonry probably mirrored the Enlightenment itself, embracing as it did the seemingly disparate strains of reason on the one hand, and mysticism on the other.
    Such a conclusion seemed a fitting end to a successful conference which was, after all, subtitled ‘many faiths, one brotherhood’.

The Canonbury Masonic Research Centre was founded in 1998 in order to facilitate the study of subjects related to Freemasonry and its place in the Western mystery traditions, in attempt to bridge the gap between Masonic and academic scholarship.