Did you know that Haydn was briefly a member of a Freemason lodge in Vienna?
It may well have been his friend, the young composer, Mozart, who introduced him to the secret society and its lodge, Zur Wahren Eintracht, or True Concord.
Haydn was initiated as an Entered Apprentice, the lowest order in the Blue Lodge, in 1785, but didn’t attend a single meeting after that.
No one knows why.
Was it because he spent most of his time on the Esterhazy Estates in Eisenstadt, Eszterhaza, and Pressburg?
Were his visits to Vienna too rare for him to make any kind of commitment to the lodge?
Not knowing much about the Freemasons when I started researching the Haydn series in 2012, I figured the composer had as great an aversion to organized societies and groups as I did. But perhaps there was a little more to it than that . . .
The Original Masons
The guild of masons, unlike other guilds, comprised members who by virtue of their trade traveled from one construction site to another. This meant there was no easy way to recognize whether someone presenting himself as a mason was indeed a fellow member of the trade.
Why was this important? Because, as with any other trade, the guild sought to guarantee the quality of its work and so protect its reputation.
Thus secret handshakes and other signs were developed for fellow masons to recognize each other and know what level of their trade each individual mason was at—whether apprentice, journeyman, or master craftsman.
Then came the Protestant Reformation. Inflamed by Luther’s ideas, the nobility sought to take over the properties of the Church. The peasants fueled by the idea of freedom decided to revolt against the nobility, causing such mayhem and violence that Luther recommended they be put down like dogs.
What all of this meant was that fewer churches and cathedrals were being built. Fewer masons were needed.
In order to survive, the masons began accepting members into their guild who were known as speculative masons—that’s to say, masons who weren’t actually engaged in the activities of construction and building.
These speculative members adopted the secret handshakes and all the other hallmarks of the “practical” masons—those who did practice the trade. They were philosophers and intellectuals, largely drawn from the nobility and the wealthy elites. What exactly were they engaged in building? A new and better version of themselves, apparently. Perhaps also a newer, better, more utopian society.
The Philosophers
By this time, thanks to Luther’s insistence on Sola Scriptura (Scripture alone, to be interpreted by each man as he will) led to interpretations that even Luther could not agree with. The Church uses the image of a three-legged stool to define the way Christ’s teachings have been handed down. Scripture is but one leg of that stool. Apostolic tradition as preserved by the Church and the Church’s teaching magisterium, or teaching authority, are the other two.
Just as Christ interpreted the Old Testament for his followers, showing them how the Law and the prophets prefigured a messiah who was not a military leader but God made flesh, the Church guided by the Holy Spirit interprets Scripture for us, holding, as Christ promised Peter, the keys of interpretation. Many of the central tenets of Christianity aren’t easily found in Scripture. The word “Trinity” isn’t in the Bible. Nor is there a clear understanding of God as a communion of Three Divine Persons—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
That Christ is the Second Person of the Trinity made flesh isn’t easily understood either. The “I am” statements that St. John uses in his Gospel to connect Jesus to the “I AM” who introduced Himself to Moses in Genesis can be very easily overlooked.
But calling himself the Son of David and referring to Ps. 110, Jesus asks the Pharisees why they think David calls the Messiah, his descendant, “my Lord.” He’s challenging them to accept that the Messiah—as King David had divined—is no ordinary person but God Himself.
When a rich man calls him “good teacher,” Jesus immediately presses him on his use of the adjective. Only God is good. Again, he’s challenging the rich man to understand that Jesus is God.
These references are so subtle, they can be missed or misunderstood.
So in the aftermath of the Protestant Reformation and Sola Scriptura, confusion reigned. Not everyone agreed on the Perpetual Virginity of the Virgin Mary—a point that Luther, siding with the Catholic Church, adamantly held to.
Despite Luther’s assertion that Scripture was self-explanatory, it wasn’t clear, for instance, what Predestination meant. The Calvinists took it to mean that an elect group would be saved. You were either in this group or you weren’t. Nothing you did in this life could affect the outcome.
The March Toward Atheism
More damning still was the fact that the Holy Trinity was called into question and along with it the belief in Christ’s divinity and that his death on the Cross had meant anything at all for us. If God hadn’t died for us, had there ever been any need for a reconciliation between man and God? Did original sin exist? If not, baptism was unnecessary and one could jettison the need for confession and the ideas of mortal sin and hell.
Surely, God, a loving, merciful Being, loved the adulterer and the murderer as much as anyone else—and didn’t require them to reform themselves. Couldn’t they be accepted just as they were?
But a God who tolerates the malevolent as well as the saintly isn’t a just God any more than is the parent or teacher who fails to discipline the one child who bullies other children. This is indifference passing for love, and it fails to satisfy.
Deep in our souls, we recognize that a loving God must also be a just God, otherwise an extreme show of mercy to the murderer becomes a cruel lack of mercy for his victims. Forgiving the unrepentant adulterer—he was simply following his passions—becomes a cruel sweeping under the carpet of the pain caused to his spouse.
Having rejected the One, True God and replaced Him with a lesser one of their own making, it wasn’t long before some people questioned whether God existed at all.
And even if He did, having created and set the Universe into motion, could one actually believe He intervened in human history? So there were different ideas in existence. But what united all these different groups with their different worldviews was the conviction that the Catholic Church was wrong; it was the enemy and needed to be taken down.
This is where the Masonic Lodges of the Speculative Masons come in. More on that in Part II of this blog.