💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › mikhail-bakunin-fragments-concerning-freemasonry.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 12:30:17. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
➡️ Next capture (2024-06-20)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Title: Fragments concerning Freemasonry Author: Mikhail Bakunin Date: 1865 Language: en Topics: Freemasonry, Libertarian Labyrinth Source: Retrieved on 25th April 2021 from https://www.libertarian-labyrinth.org/bakunin-library/fragments-concerning-freemasonry-i-1865/][www.libertarian-labyrinth.org]] and [[https://www.libertarian-labyrinth.org/bakunin-library/fragments-concerning-freemasonry-b-1865/ Notes: Working translation by Shawn P. Wilbur
In order to become once again a living and useful body, Freemasonry must
once again seriously take up the service of humanity. But what does
these words mean today: to serve humanity? – Would it be to protect the
innocents and the weak, to care for the sick, to feed and clothe the
destitute, to give education to poor children? All of these works are
extremely commendable and as practical applications of the principle of
human fraternity, they are more or less part, according to the capacity
of each, of the duties not only of a true freemason, but also of every
man who is not a stranger to the sentiment of charity. However, if
Freemasonry had no other aim but to practice them, there would be no
difference between it and countless religious associations that also
have no aim but the exercise of charity. – The immense difference that
separates them [freemasons] from all those religious institutions is
expressed uniquely by the different spirits in which Freemasonry on one
hand, and the Christian associations on the other, distribute their
education and their assistance. The latter have for their absolute and
final aim the glory of God much more than the alleviation of human
suffering, the triumph of the religious spirit, the submission of man to
the divine yoke, and consequently to that of the Church and all the
temporal authorities sanctioned by the Church—and as a necessary
consequence the degradation and abdication of human reason, of human
will, the negation of all liberty, slavery. – Freemasonry, on the
contrary, if it wants to remain faithful to its primary purpose, must
desire the complete emancipation of man, the constitution of humanity
through liberty on the ruins of all authority.
Religion says:
individual. He encompasses the world, and he is outside and above this
Universe that he has created. He is all light, Wisdom, Love, Beauty,
Truth, Goodness and Justice. Apart from him, in the world and in man, as
long as they have not been visited by his special grace, everything is
only lies, iniquity and darkness. – It is the kingdom of death. Never,
by his own efforts, can man rise up to God. Left to himself, he never
would have even felt the longing, the desire; – for by itself the lie
would never have any intuition of the truth, nor the darkness of
perdition, the instinct of the divine light. So this desire is never
kindled in the heart of man except as an effect of the divine grace that
calls upon it in that manner and invites it to purify itself in order to
receive the spirit of God. For if man cannot rise by himself up to
heaven, God, in his supreme goodness, can descend to the world and to
man in order to enlighten him, to make him race up through his grace, in
order to be saved. –
this world, he can only reveal himself through his elect. – These are
his missionary Saints, his prophets, – this is finally how Christianity
claims the very son of God, God like his Father, eternally one with him,
although different from him. It is Jesus Christ who descends to the
earth, makes himself a man, and suffers the martyrdom and humiliations
of the cross, dies, is resurrected and rises up again into heaven,
bearing with him the divine curse that weighed on all of humanity, and
leaving to that humanity the possibility, the open path of salvation.
revelation. Human reason, left to itself, could only give rise to
lies—and the heart, the conscience could produce only disorder and
iniquity. Nothing is as fatal for man as having faith in his own reason,
in his own heart, in his own conscience. – His reason is madness before
God, and his natural justice, the instinct of his heart is an impiety. –
To believe in it is to commit the satanic crime of pride, the crime
against the Holy Spirit for which there is no pardon either on earth or
in heaven. – The first step of salvation, the first effect of grave on
the spirit and on the heart of man, must be this: the man must renounce
all philosophy independent of revealed theology, he must sacrifice,
mistrust his thought and all the voice of his natural conscience, of his
heart, – he must annul himself in order to make himself capable of
receiving the truth and justice of God, which has been revealed him and
which always continues to be explained to him by the prophets and which
he must accept with that much more faith since he feels himself
incapable of understanding them and since they disgust his natural
instincts. –
them, form the Church. – The church is holy, because established by God
himself, founded originally by the Elect of his grace. It has the Holy
mission of preserving and perpetuating, in all its purity, then of
explaining and developing for the use of generations to come, the divine
tradition of revealed Truth and Justice. The Church could not accomplish
that mission if it was not perpetually enlightened and guided by the
spirit of God.0—Thus, the holy spirit resides in it; it is its
continuing, unique and infallible expression. Thus, no Truth and no
Justice apart from the Church.
also called to govern, without sharing, human society, and it can direct
it in the path of salvation. – Once man has sacrificed his reason and
his own conscience for the greater glory of Gold, he must also place his
will at the feet of the holy Church. – The sacrifice of human reason and
conscience necessarily leads to divine slavery, the absolute government
of man by the Church – and every serious and sincere divine religion
divine must lead to theocracy. – The Nations that are happiest, most
privileged and especially blessed by God are those that are immediately
and directly governed by the Priests, by God’s Elect, as in Paraguay and
Rome. – The less privileged Peoples are governed by secular Princes:
emperors, kings, dukes, who through the intermediary, but only through
the intermediary of the Church, are the anointed, the emissaries of the
Lord, who, strong with this right, establish in their turn military and
civil authorities, right up to the jailer and the executioner, to
govern, administer and judge, to reward and punish the kingdoms, the
provinces, the cities, the towns, and all the individuals, save for the
priests. – It is in this sense only that all authority comes from God,
and every revolt against any temporal authority is a crime against God.
– The Princes, and the authorities established by them, are legitimate
and sacred only because they are established and sanctioned by the
Church, because they are themselves subject to the Church.
ambition, have wanted to shake off the divine yoke of the Church, and in
rebellion after rebellion, have ended up declaring themselves the
anointed of the Lord and ruling by their own will and grace, independent
of and apart from the Church: “The absolute Monarchy of Louis XIV,” said
Quinet, “had as a condition the absolute monarchy of Roman Catholicism:
the two things are inseparable. The wish to be freed from Rome was in
reality, for Louis XIV and his successors, to strip themselves of their
principle and destroy their own foundation. I sincerely wish, if I am a
believer, to submit to the absolute power, on the condition that I am
shown that this power follows from my belief, that I cannot dispute the
first without shaking the second. That royalty, enveloped in the
mysteries of Catholicism, becomes itself an object of faith; I am
besieged on all sides; I bend the knee before an authority that covers
the king with the priest, the priest with the king. – But, if that
monarchy, remaining absolute, does not with itself to be limited by its
principle, if it uses its genius to separate itself from the sanctuary,
to descend into the public square supported only by itself, then its
pride is its doom; for I surprise in its isolation and nakedness. All
its draperies will not prevent me from measuring the void that it has
dug in its own path. In order to have the most absolute mastery, it has
rejected the authority that sustains it; all that remains to it is to
fall.” –
Quinet was right, and what is true for France is also true for all the
other countries. The kings, by revolting against the Church—the sanctity
of which, however, they continue to recognize—have prepared and in some
ways legitimated the rebellions of the peoples against them: They have
produced the revolution, – the uprising of the nations against the law
of the Church and of God.
monarchical power, have at the same time overthrown the divine
government of the Church. This is the insurrection of the natural man,
bent for centuries under a salutary yoke, against the law of God, – the
outburst of all the human passions against the truth and justice of God.
– It is the revolt of the spirit that claims to oppose a human, ungodly
philosophy to the mysteries of divine revelation. It is the revolt of
the human conscience, which opposes its own justice to the grace of the
Lord.Finally, it is the revolt of the human will, which under the
impious pretext of liberty and a so-called natural right, dares put a
destructive hand on institutions established and consecrated by a divine
authority. – God has permitted and still endures that infamous folly and
crime in order to finally convince human society, that, left to its own
devices, only taking counsel of its reason and liberty liberté, it can
only give rise to misfortune and disorder, and that, incapable of
attaining a happiness impossible on this earth of expiations and trials,
it courts its eternal perdition.
but salvation for sinners, warned them, urged them through the voice of
the holy Church, which more recently, through the voice of the Supreme
Pontiff, has cast a holy anathema:
reaching and understanding truth, and that it must not prostrate itself
with an absolute and blind faith before the incomprehensible mysteries
of revelation.
to justice, and that the natural moral law produced by the heart and
conscience of man must not be scorned, renounced and broken before the
mysterious commandments of heaven.
of man, and who do not want to accept that which is beautiful, noble,
and generous according to the flesh, according to the natural instinct
and inspiration of man, is necessarily vile, impious and abject
according to God, – and that on the contrary that which is holy, just
and beautiful according to Divine reason must necessarily appear
disgusting, odious and unjust to the man not enlightened by grace.
Anathema against those who claim that man should not sacrifice the
natural affections of the flesh—human honor, that so-called person
dignity that is only a frightful indignity before God, friendship, the
love of the father, of the brother, of the husband and son, love of the
homeland and even love of humanity—to the supreme love of God.
consist of the development of their natural dispositions: of the
strength, health and beauty of their bodies through hygiene and
exercise; of their minds through thought, and of their will, their
individual dignity through teaching, through the example of mutual human
respect and through a progressive liberty. Anathema against those who
teach children that labor, far from being a punishment, a degradation, a
sign of slavery and a sign of the divine curse, as the Holy Scriptures
reveal to us, is a sacred duty for every man, the sign of his strength
and dignity, the very basis of his rights and his liberty. Anathema
against those who give education to children with a view to forming
strong men, full of honor and individual dignity, full of respect for
the rights and dignity of others, proud of their liberty, loving justice
and equality, and professing, in all matters and all circumstances of
life, the impious cult of humanity, – and who renounce and reject for
that same end a religious education: Sanctity. – Anathema against those
who dazzle themselves with a satanic pride and who seeking truth,
justice, the goal of humanity in the development of its natural forces
and faculties, remain ignorant or reject that holy truth: that the sole
aim of the education of children is not to develop, but on the contrary
to kill the human strength, beauty, reason, will, justice, honor,
dignity, respect, and love in them, – in order to make room in their
hears for the inspirations of heaven; – not to make them free men, but
slaves of God. And as the Church, sole possessor of divine truth, can
alone give that religious education, anathema above all against those
who have wrested the schools away from its absolute government.
present society towards well-being and happiness on this earth, as if
this earth was not, according to the will of God himself, a place of
punishment, expiation, purification, trials and unhappiness. – “Happy
are those who suffer. Happy those who hunger and thirst.”
no more place for charity. – Anathema against those who seek liberty,
equality, justice and fraternity—in short, paradise on earth—for by this
search they renounce the heavenly kingdom, and contenting themselves
with their fate, revolt against God.
revolutionaries, humanitarian philosophers, blasphemers of divine right
and the temporal authority of the Princes. Anathema against all those
who preach rebellion, even among the cruelest and most odious tyranny,
forgetting that all authority comes from God, that God and his Church
are, consequently, the sole judges of the tyrants, – and that the only
protest permitted to the subjects against the established tyrannical
powers is an appeal to the holy and supreme jurisdiction of the Church,
sole representative of the will of God on Earth.
subjects, who dare claim that the temporal power of the kings can and
should be independent of the Church, – and that the Church, sole path to
salvation for all of humanity, does not have the right and the mission
to control and direct human affairs—not only religious, but also
political and social—and to exercise a supreme power over the Princes as
well as all their subjects.
world by the sovereign Pontiff, inspired by God himself and received
with a holy enthusiasm by all the catholic and even protestant
believers, has as its double aim to warn, to exhort, to stop the impious
at the edge of the precipice, and at the same time to reassure and
comfort the faithful. – That it is a sign of the times, – and that the
hour is not far off – the hour of Divine justice – when god himself,
with his all-powerful hand, will break the revolt and bring straying
human society back under the supreme authority of the apostolic and
roman church, the only logical, only substantial, and consequently the
only truly divine church; so that man, ceasing to be thinking,
dignified, free, and human, will become once again a slave or sheep, –
so that, in accordance with the Holy Scripture, there will only be one
shepherd in the world and only one single flock.
---
Such is the pure Catholic teaching. Such is the rigorous consequence of
all religious doctrine, whether Catholic, Protestant, Mohammedan,
Jewish, or even pagan. Christianity is precisely the absolute religion,
in that it expounds and manifest the fundamental principle, the very
nature and essence of all religion, which is the systematic
impoverishment, destruction and enslavement of humanity for the profit
of the Divinity, – the supreme principle not only of every religion, but
also of every metaphysics which assumes an otherworldly, personal God, a
real God, for its object – the impersonal God of Pantheism being nothing
but an imaginary phantom of thought. – I say that Theism as well as
Trinitarianism, the one god of so-called rational Theology once
accepted, the degeneration of humanity must necessarily be proclaimed:
God being all, man is nothing. – God being Truth, Justice and eternal
life – man is lies, iniquity and death. – Truth and Justice not being
immanent in him, he must receive them as a revelation from on high
through the intermediary of God’s Elect, who, being his instructors, his
doctors and his Masters for eternal life, inevitably receive from that
the mission of governing and commanding him on this earth. – So he owes
them his faith and absolute obedience. – So the existence of God
necessarily implies the abdication of human reason, conscience and will,
the negation of liberty, Slavery. That is what, of all the religions
existing on the Earth, Christianity alone has understood, and that among
the Christian sects Roman Catholicism has alone proclaimed and realized
with rigorous consequence. – It is once more the reason why Christianity
is the absolute religion, and why the Apostolic and Roman Church is the
only one that is serious, legitimate and divine.
So apologies to all our demi-philosophers, to all our thinkers by half,
apologies to our freemason brothers who invoke the Great Architect or
the Universe and, wanting to form a church and new form of worship,
believe they can reconcile the idea of God with human liberty. In this
fatally rigorous and logical alphabet whoever says this [A] must
absolutely arrive at Z, – and whoever worships God must sacrifice the
dignity and liberty of man. “God is, so man is a slave.” – “Man is free,
so there is no God.” – I challenge anyone to escape from that circle. –
And now let us choose. –
[translation of items in illustration:]
Masonic Symbol:
Reason
Liberty Equality Solidarity
Justice
Reason – Labor – Justice – Liberty – Equality – Solidarity
Theological Symbol:
Revelation
Privilege Selfishness
Slavery
Grace
Revelation – Charity – Grace – Authority – Privilege – Selfishness
Reason – Revelation
Labor – Charity
Justice – Grace
Liberty – Slavery
Equality – Privilege
Solidarity – Despotism
Freemasonry considering:
Supreme Master of all things, is incompatible with human reason and
liberty; –
creature, which for that reason appeared eternal, of a God more or less
dispersed through the world, – is a metaphysical fiction, without real
practical significance, and as contradictory and confused in its form as
in its spirit, half-wrought result of a philosophy that has only half
delivered itself from the swaddling clothes of theology, – and that by
affirming this impersonal God one affirms absolutely nothing that is
clear, precise and definite, nothing that enlightens the conscience and
that could serve as a basis for human society. That this God who,
possessing the whole world, does not even possess himself ad who
consequently is not God, this Creator who is not a creator at all, is a
blind and inexorable power, who, not being directed by an individual
will, is nothing but Necessity: which is to say the complex and totality
of life and of the laws of the universe—which is to say Nature itself
and nothing but Nature. That while bending us before the conditions and
the immutable, invincible laws of nature, which our instinct can
sometimes foresee, but which our reason alone can recognize and that,
despite the fact that they never cease to surround, penetrate and govern
all our existence in an absolute manner, exist for us as laws only
insofar as our reason recognizes them; – while submitting to them
through reason and will, we can neither deify them, nor idolize them,
because by deifying them we denature them and deprive them of their
rational character, the only thing that establishes their reality and
power;
by its own nature or by its essence, and not being able to escape
without ceasing to exist or to be itself, consequently can comprehend
and grasp, or even note the simple existence of something, only if that
thing was in part integral to itself, or it is inherent, immanent to it;
– that consequently in order for one of my faculties to be able to
reveal to me the existence of God, it would be necessary for God to be
ideally part of myself; – that if an otherworldly and extra-human God
existed, it still could only manifest itself to me in the conditions of
my being, only insofar as it would be absolutely identical and in
conformity with my human nature—so that all these revelations would be
nothing but natural and rational manifestations of humanity itself in
man—
the ancient and modern Gods, from the brutal fancies of fetishism to
Christian Trinitarianism were nothing but human creations, marking so
many great historical moments in the development of humanity:
Since man in his generous humility has been happy, through the
succession of centuries, from the beginning of history to our own times,
unfeather his nest and despoil the earth in order to create and enrich
the heavens, to the detriment of his happiness, his dignity and his
liberty:
Taking back from heaven what belongs to the earth, and making God, which
is to say the human ideal, return into man himself, modern Freemasonry
replaces the cult of the Great Architect of the Universe with that of
Humanity.
[End of fragment]
---
Leaving aside the transcendent question, probably insoluble for man, of
the Absolute and the existence or non-existence of an otherworldly and
extra-human God; –
Considering at the same time that as soon as man posits the truth and
justice, the principle regulator of his acts, outside of his being,
outside of his reason and conscience, he declares himself at that moment
incapable of justice and truth, and posits the necessity of a
revelation, and consequently the necessity of an absolute authority,
which, in the form of the Church and the State, subjects him to a yoke,
contrary to his reasons, his conscience and his liberty; – that the
Church and State, necessarily represented by men, who, either through
the effects of a fanatical illusion, or through guile, arrogate to
themselves the mission and the impious right to speak, to act and to
command their fellows in the name of this God, unknown to all the world;
– that this exorbitant, impious privilege, which by the very force of
things becomes hereditary, must necessarily and, as all history proves
to us, has never failed to produce in human society the hierarchy of
castes and classes, divinely privileged and exclusively governing by the
grace of God; that all exclusivism and all privilege being, through the
effect of a fundamental law inherent in humanity, an infallible source
of intellectual and moral impoverishment, stupefaction, exhaustion and
corruption, – these classes and these castes, in degrading through the
very effects of their privilege, have never failed to substitute their
individual interests for the interests of all, the arbitrariness of
their selfishness and greed for the eternal laws of justice, to exploit,
in a word, the goods of their earn for their own profit, condemning the
peoples to a life of misery and slavery on the earth, and leaving them
for their only consolation the fallacious promises of a happiness beyond
the grave;
Considering that every Being, being determined and consequently limited
by its own nature, cannot escape it without ceasing to exist or, what
amounts to the same things, without ceasing to be itself; that,
consequently, by even supposing the existence of a supernatural,
superhuman, otherworldly supreme being, man would only recognize it
humanly, not as it is in itself, but only as it can be reflected and
manifested in the human being, without destroying it, – that is to say
in the conditions and in the very forms of humanity – that consequently
all theology is necessarily anthropomorphism, – and that all the
historical revelations of God and of Gods, from the brutal divinities of
fetishism to Christian Trinitarianism and even to the one God of the
rationalist metaphysics, – have been nothing but successive
manifestations of humanity itself, of the truth and justice immanent in
man, but that by a historically necessary illusion he had first
transported outside himself into a fictive heaven, in order to worship
them like foreign to himself, like his masters, thus making himself the
slave of his human essence and of the very sources of his liberty; –
Considering that all historical progress consist first of all in that
successive creation of Gods by man, in the development and in the
explanation of the essence and eternal foundations of humanity in the
heavens, so that man can contemplate there, as if in a mirror, his own
truth, his own justice and his whole destiny; – then in the act—no less
solemn, religious and above all necessary—of taking back from heaven
what belongs to the earth, of rendering to man what he had created
himself, and making God, truth and justice return into him, in order to
finally make him master of his destiny, and to proclaim him adult, free
and capable finally of fulfilling his mission on earth;
Considering finally that in this way justice, truth, everything that in
the historical religions has been called God, are immanent in man – that
it is the proper essence of humanity – that consequently in order to
recognize it, we have no need of revelation, as in order to accomplish
them we have not need of external, supernatural assistance; that by
drawing only on ourselves we will inevitably find both their explanation
and the strength to realize them –
Considering, on the contrary, that as long as we have sought them
outside ourselves, on high, by a fatal law of intellectual and moral
optics, we have obtained for the Earth only the inversion of everything
we adore in Heaven: – that by transporting truth, Justice, liberty and
God to that heaven, – we have necessarily and constantly delivered the
earth to lies, to iniquity, to slavery and to the Devil – we send those
back to heaven, to the world of the privileged, – and we take back as
our own, on this earth, God, truth, justice and our dear and holy
liberty. –
So without entering into the philosophical debate on the existence or
nonexistence of a supernatural and otherworldly God—which we consider
practically useless, to say the least—abandoning that question to the
individual conscience of each, we affirm:
1. That every that on the earth, in human society, in the world of
history, we have called God and divine revelations, has been nothing but
the creation, the development and a series of successive manifestations
of the universal genius of humanity –
2. That if an otherworldly God exists, no man has ever seen him, nor
could he hear his voice, nor consequently express his thought, nor
manifest his will. – That the great men of history, the legislators, the
prophets, the thinkers, the poets, have only been able to draw their
inspirations from the depths of the human being;
3. That no man has had, has, or will ever have the possibility or the
right of speaking and commanding his fellows in the name of God –
4. That the whole mission of man as a collective and individual being is
to understand and to realize, not thoughts, wills and laws that would be
external to him and would come to him through superhuman and
supernatural revelations from on high, but the laws fundamental to and
inherent in his own human nature –
5. – That consequently the active intervention of the idea of God in
human affairs, far from being a necessary condition of morals and of the
organization of order in society, would be, on the contrary, as both
logic and history demonstrate to us, an impediment and an absolute ruin
for both, – and would become, as in the past, an infallible source in
lies, iniquity and anarchy slavery on earth –
Rejecting every revelation and all authority, divine and human, we
affirm: Human reason, collective and individual, as the sole criterion
of truth: the human conscience as the basis of justice and individual
and collective liberty as source and unique foundation of order in
humanity. –
---
[Section crossed-out in original]
1. By abandoning the cult and service of the Divinity to religion,
Freemasonry devotes itself exclusively to the service and cult of
Humanity.
2. Freemasonry, while revering them, does not deify nature or humanity.
A. What we call Nature is the Totality of all existing, living beings, –
a totality in which nothing is found isolated, and of which solidarity
is the fundamental and supreme law. All that lives, everything that
exists, large and small things, the simplest and the most compound, the
farthest away like the nearest, all the forces, the least atoms,
exercise and suffer, either directly or by transmission, and most often
in an imperceptible manner, an incessant mutual influence and
dependence; and that eternal action and reaction of the Whole on each
Point and of each Point on the Whole, constitutes the life, the harmony,
the common and supreme law of that Totality of Worlds which is at once
always producer and product. Always creative and active, that universal
solidarity has formed our terrestrial planet and given to each of its
part, in geological and climatological relations, their conditions of
being and their different physiognomies. It is that solidarity that has
given and gives birth to the vegetable and animal life….