Synopsis
The Transmission of Ideas from Europe to Russia via Masonic Lodges
Freemasonry-related works of many eighteenth-century Russian members of the fraternity include many diverse elements beyond the descriptions of their experiences in Freemasonry. These elements include their ideas on faith, science, religion, God, Creation, the end of history, discussions of the Orthodox Christian tradition, Cabalistic and mystical sources as well as Christian interpretations of the Old and the New Testaments and of Russian history. This dizzying mixture of philosophical and religious traditions and a puzzling eschatological understanding of history permeate, for instance, Ivan Elagin’s writings. I argue that this is characteristic of a general outlook that many Russian Freemasons held in the eighteenth century. In the course of the eighteenth century, Russian intellectuals confronted a range of intellectual currents that were new to them, including neo-stoicism, various trends of Christian traditions, Renaissance thought, Enlightenment ideas, Hermeticism, Cabalistic thought, as well as Pythagorean and Newtonian science. Freemasons tried to fit diverse strands of these Western ideas with the traditional Russian values, embodied by the Russian Orthdox Church, thereby seeking a new basis for knowledge that could raise the moral climate of society, while still having foundations consistent with Reason. This willingness to bring together various sources did not mean the outright rejection of the new Enlightenment philosophy. Instead, rather than emphasizing only the natural and the rational, Russian Freemasons attempted to incorporate supernatural and spiritual outlooks into their world view. In trying to resolve the tension between traditional and new, rational and spiritual, knowable and mysterious, they based their theories on Christian and Renaissance traditions, alongside the latest Enlightenment theories.
While it is impossible to uncover a singular source of intellectual influence in Russian Freemasonry or a single unifying Masonic world view, the primary focus of its members invariably was on what they called the Science of Man. This term encapsulated a preoccupation with morality, ethical teaching, the nature of knowledge and the correlation between science and a belief in its applicability to the issue of human nature. Although Freemasons across Europe were preoccupied with similar ethical and epistemological problems, Russian brothers had to deal with them in a peculiar situation. Given their ongoing struggle to define themselves in the process of Westernization, the problem crystallized into the need to create a foundation for a new concept of self.
This interest in creating a Science of Man manifested itself through ideas about character and character building, a preoccupation with self-knowledge, and the study of man from both a spiritual and physical perspective. Although many eighteenth-century Masonry-related works and lectures in Russia provided a precise practical philosophy regarding man, his nature and his aims, that attempted to define the constituent elements of a moral man, Masonic anthropology was not confined to simple ethical self-improvement. One of the foundational philosophical problems that needed to be addressed in the process of creating a Science of Man was the issue of the correlation between the material body and an immaterial soul and/or reason that was able to find expression in a mechanically operated body. Whether it was the rejection of God as the universal essence of everything that exists or the extension of the idea of animals as purely physical automata to men, the two-substance view posed a set of serious problems for Enlightenment philosophers. Yet, not much is known about the reception of this Cartesian dualism in eighteenth-century Russia. Many historians and philosophers concentrate on ‘the fundamentally anti-Cartesian nature of Russian philosophy’ after the 1820s, postulating that philosophy in Russia was marked by a rigorous counter-rationalism as opposed to the reason-based course of Western philosophy.
However, Russian thinkers began grappling with the implications of the mind-body dualism early in the eighteenth century. By the end of the eighteenth century, they actively used Cartesian dualism (although they did not always refer to Descartes directly) in order to try and reconcile the tension between the use of reason and its ultimate consequences for Orthodoxy. Some of these Russian thinkers adopted the dual-aspect theory of Cartesianism on the grounds that a third entity could be responsible for the interactions between mind and body. Such an approach was advocated as a means to remedy the radical materialistic essence of Cartesian ideas, which in Russia was often combined with Leibnizian psychophysical parallelism, as displayed in the works of many Freemasons in Russia. Many Masonic thinkers, including Johann Georg Schwarz, Lavrentii Davydovskii, Ivan Elagin and Nikolai Novikov, allied themselves with the Cartesian project of establishing the sciences on a metaphysical foundation derived from indubitably 'clear and distinct' ideas. In other words, they adopted a Cartesian dualism in which such ideas reveal that the body, as an extended entity, is actually distinct from the mind, as a thinking thing. However, they complicated this ontological scheme by introducing a third entity – the soul. By aiding the knowing powers of reason with feelings and imagination they sought to overcome the mind–body conundrum of Cartesian dualism and tried to avoid lapsing into the dangerous realm of materialist monism.
- Natalie Bayer, Drake University, Indiana, USA
natalie.bayer@drake.edu
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