SCOTTISH FREEMASONRY 1725-1810 ... - Lodge Prudentia

made manifest in the mathematical and architectural skills displayed in those
early artisan achievements.” 125 Modern freemasonry “looked backward as well
as forward,” 126 and it was this “peculiar combination of modern science and
ancient religion that…lay at the heart of the new Masonic fraternity.” 127 As
David Stevenson explains, the “transformation from late Renaissance to early
Enlightenment was an evolutionary one, the new values being linked to the old,”
as “alchemical and Hermetic quests gave way to ‘modern’ science and
Newtonianism.” 128
Freemasons also embraced the Newtonian model of the universe, with its
emphasis upon power and benevolence, the importance of “order, stability, and
the rule of the law,” and the “possibility of creating perfect harmony in human
society.” 129 Mary Ann Clawson gives a definition of Newtonian principles as it
applied to early eighteenth-century freemasonry:
The Newtonian flavor of Masonic rhetoric, with its frequent references
to God as the Universal Architect, has often been noted and Freemasonry
seen as an institution permeated with the values of the early
Enlightenment…Reflection upon God’s plan in the natural world could
be used as a guide to God’s plan for the moral world…Especially,
contemplation of the physical order could reveal the importance of social
order and harmony. 130
125 Jacob, Radical Enlightenment, 115.
126 Melton, Rise of the Public, 253.
127 Bullock, Revolutionary Brotherhood, 9.
128 Stevenson, Origins, 232.
129 Jacob, Living The Enlightenment, 57. Hyland also writes that “the term ‘Newtonian’
represents a view of nature as a universal system explicable in terms of mathematical reasoning,
divinely created and ordered,” The Enlightenment. A Sorucebook and Reader (London, 2003),
38.
130 Clawson, Constructing Brotherhood, 65-73. See also Margaret Jacob, The Newtonians and
the English Revolution 1689-1720 (New York, 1976). Clawson’s discussion of Newtonianism is
confined to English Freemasonry; she ultimately concludes that “the Grand Lodge of England
was an organization dominated by this popular Newtonianism,” Constructing Brotherhood, 65-
66.
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