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The Enlightenment: The Rise of Modern Paganism (Vol. 1) (v. 1)

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Peter Gay is an important intellectual historian and in his lengthy work "The Enlightenment: The Rise of Modern Paganism" he summarizes the ideas of the great philosophers and how they changed the world. This book is a work of great erudition, of synthesis and he begins with the relationship between the philosophers of the 18th century and those of the classical period. The philosophers of the Enlightenment, active in the late seventeenth through the middle of the eighteenth century, had an affection for the Greek and Roman era, but felt the recent discoveries in science, the search for empirical fact, had allowed their own era to supercede the work of the great classical philosophers.
While the classicists inspired the philosophers of the Enlightenment, theis new breed of thinkers were generally contemptuous of religion and they sought to confront, to challenge and to overturn the philosophical concepts of the Hebrew and Christian thinkers who they viewed as their rhetorical adversaries in the battle beaten reason and faith.
Gay is an engaging writer with a gift for synthesizing a raft of material. Here he neatly summarizes the philosophical historians work: "...the philosophes wrote history with rage and with partisanship, and their very passion allowed them to penetrate into regions hitherto inaccessible to historical explorers. Yet it also made them condescending and oddly parochial: their sense of the past merged all too readily with their sense of the present." Although the philosophes view of history was critical, pessimistic, they saw the world "divided between ascetic superstitious enemies of the flesh, and men who affirmed life, the body, knowledge, and generosity; between mythmakers and realists, priests and philosophers."
Gay's book neatly depicts an age, the conflicts between enlightenment thinkers and the past, their areas of agreement and disagreement and, their battles with the weakened Christianity of the day. He points out how te philosophers used the scholarship and erudition of the Catholic orders against them. "The Enlightenment" is not a history of philosophy, summarizing the work of each major philosopher, but a history of the way that the ideas and the debate developed in the period. In this volume, he writes of Voltaire, Hume, Smith, Bentham, Gibbon, Diderot, Montsequieu, Lessing, Locke, Holbach, Rousseau and finally, Jefferson and Franklin, intertwining them in a consistent narrative. He concludes the book with a helpful bibliographical essay which will help point those of us who want to do further reading in the right direction. Elegantly written, in clear, crisp prose, "The Enlightenment" is a detailed and nuanced account of the men and ideas that gave us the gift - and curse - of modernity.

Peter Gay needs no introduction, but I still feel that this work needs to be lauded for what it manages to achieve: it provides an exhaustively detailed socio-cultural account of the enlightenment that is as enjoyable as it is informative. The main slant of this work, namely that the 18th century enlightenment was a reprisal/continuation/adoration of classical (hence Pagan) culture is coherent and functions as a solid structure to this work. Highly recommended.

Unlike the reformation there was no counter-enlightenment. The Church was ineffectual in mounting an offense against a movement whose claim was that she was an out-moded relic, not to be listened to in a modern, technological world. How do you fight the charge that you are irrelevant without admitting irrelevancy? How do you fight the disease without spreading it? And as Peter Gay shows, the philosophes needed no help in spreading the word. They were a brilliant collection of Scientists, Philosophers and writers spread out over the west for almost three generations. They included such luminaries as Voltaire, David Hume, Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, Immanuel Kant, J. J. Rousseau and so on, even to this country (we recognize two philosophes, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin on our currency). They were involved in a conspiracy (literally) to change their world. And to give you some idea how successful they were, the first generation lived in a world ruled exclusively by hereditary monarchy; the last lived to see both the French and American revolutions and the beginnings of democracy.

The philosophes taught a cheerful kind of self-reliance. Salvation was not to be found in the heavens above, but in the human race. They fought to replace barbaric institutions with new modes of thought that would inspire, not oppress, the human spirit. New modes of government (democracy). New methods of tending the sick (see Foucault's "Birth of the Clinic") and the insane (see Foucault's "Madness and Civilization"). New modes of punishing offenders (see Foucault's "Discipline and Punish"). New modes of thought. To examine our existing institutions we need not go back to the Middle Ages (the term "Middle Ages" is an example of enlightenment newspeak: the Middle ages designates nothing more than period the West lay fallow between the death of ancient paganism and it rebirth in the "Renaissance." It is a way of saying that while the Church ruled Europe, nothing of consequence happened) except as a point of contrast. They changed everything.

We have an odd relation to these philosophes. We recognize them as simplistic, overbearing, overconfident and, in many ways, flat out wrong. We also recognize them as the founding fathers of our world. They assured us, get rid of religion and wars would cease from the world, that religion (or rather specific religions e.g. Christianity) was the source of bigotry on the earth. So we did as they suggested and the wars just got bigger, the auto-de-fe's were replaced by concentration camps and the savagery they told us would disappear simply grew when the institutions built to contain them were dismantled.

They seemed to believe that we could have the results of Christian morality, without Christianity, if we simply replace religion with reason. The problem is that Christianity is a religion with a specific content and reason has no content at all. When you make the move you end up with a categorical imperative that we can debate the validity of, but is no real morality as it is effective only over individuals who accept its terms. And not all individual will understand the argument, much less accept the terms of it. The morality of reason preaches only to it own converts, leaving the rest to their own devices. The philosophes proved to be social tinkerers and we are their experiment.

Gay's book is beautifully written, wonderfully detailed and very, very long (I refer here to the two volume set), but it brings you into touch with those amazing individuals, their struggle together, and amongst themselves, the varying social climates in which they lived (Germay was different from France which was different again from England), their resentment towards the establishment, followed by their becoming the establishment. I could barely put it down.

A magnificent, thorough, and long book (419 pages), impeccably documented, the first volume of two. A "must read" for anyone interested in the Enlightenment. The "cheerleaders" of the Enlightenment, from all over Europe, called themselves the philosophes. For a preview, read the 25 page beginning, "Overture."

BOOK ONE: THE APPEAL TO ANTIQUITY

CHAPTER ONE: The Useful and Beloved Past

1. Hebrews and Hellenes: As the philosophes of the Enlightenment saw it, the world was divided into two irreconcilable patterns of life: superstition versus the affirmation of life; mythmakers versus realists; priests versus philosophers. The historical writings of the Enlightenment were all part of their comprehensive effort to secure rational control over the world and freedom from the pervasive domination of myth. The most glaring and notorious defect of the Enlightenment was its unsympathetic, often brutal, estimate of Christianity.

2. A Congenial Sense and Spirit: Rome belonged to every educated man Classic antiquity was inescapable, therefore, some of the philosophes' seemingly pagan ideas were simply the property of thinking men in their time. The philosophes identified with their favorite ancient philosophers, especially Cicero, who had contempt for the fear of death, contempt for superstition, and admiration for sturdy pagan self-reliance. Modern historians no longer think of Christianity as a complete swamp, but the reliance of the Enlightenment on ancient classicism has withstood two centuries of criticism.

3. The Search for Paganism: From Identification to Identity: The philosophes had been born into a Christian world. They knew their Bible, their catechism, their articles of faith, their apologetics, retained many of their Christian friends, and even had clergy in their families. Gibbons was not without anxiety when he wrote his notorious chapters on the origin of Christianity in "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire." The German philosophes were reluctant to completely abandon the religion of the past. Diderot, the most ebullient of the French philosophes was driven and harassed by doubts. In a letter to his mistress, he cursed the atheism he accepted as true that "reduced their love to a blind encounter of atoms." Even David Hume, whose good cheer was celebrated, had to brood and struggle his way into paganism.

CHAPTER TWO: The First Enlightenment

1. Greece: From Myth to Reason: The philosophes' historical thought was closely tied and deeply, if unconsciously, indebted to the Renaissance. Pious historians during the Renaissance and in the 17th century aided secularization by refining techniques of research, throwing doubt on extravagant tales of Hebrew prophets or Christian saints. The Old Testament, which had served countless generations as authoritative was in decline. The philosophes used it as neither authoritative nor historical, but as an incriminating document. Petrarch removed the label "Dark Ages" from classical pre-Christian times and fastened it instead on the Christian era.

2. The Roman Enlightenment: The Greeks were the teachers of the Romans, but the Romans were the Greeks made plain. The philosophes' two most reliable sources of literature were the Romans Lucretius and Cicero. No propagandist ever conducted a battle of science against religion more exuberantly than Lucretius. Religion was just superstition maintained by terror. Science was reason, offering a complete and coherent account of the universe. Cicero gave them even more - a philosophy of the public servant was that of humanism. Not far behind was the historian Tacitus, who was Gibbon's source of much of what is in "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire." These and other Roman Stoics and Epicurians gave the philosophes much fuel for their political and religious criticisms.

CHAPTER THREE: The Climate of Criticism

1. Criticism as Philosophy: Hume proclaimed philosophy the supreme, indeed, the only, cure for superstition. Diderot - The philosopher should not be the inventor of systems but the apostle of truth. Adam Smith - Cultivation of philosophy is "the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition." For the Enlightenment, the Age of Philosophy was also, and mainly, the Age of Criticism - they were synonyms - and there were plenty of liberal Christians ready to allow the new philosophy elbow room, provided it stopped barely short of the holiest of matters.

2. The Hospitable Pantheon: Each philosophe took what suited him from the Romans (or from anywhere) and added their characteristic touches, leading to eclecticism - the school that denied being a school. The eclectic "makes a philosophy for himself, individual and personal, one that is his own." The favorite theft of the philosophes was from the Stoicism of Cicero, but since they addressed their propaganda to a largely Christian audience, they also quoted the founders of Christianity, including Jesus. Such adroit posturing barely concealed the philosophes' convictions that Christianity was the worst of fanaticisms.

3. The Primacy of Moral Realism: The philosophes' practicalities were worldly, designed to translate into reality Bacon's and Descarte's grandiose vision of man controlling nature for his profit and desire. In a culture in which men believed in God and yearned for salvation, the study of His nature were matters of intense blessed concern - but during the Enlightenment, they seemed more like verbal games. Nor could the philosophes separate the study of nature from the study of morality. They were confident that the public needed to be educated and it was their calling to educate them.

4. Candide: The Epicurean as Stoic: Voltaire wrote a reality tale - a dialogue on behalf of Newton's empiricism in a world that had discarded myth; and one that caricaturized and satirized Leibniz. Candide is essentially a declaration of war on Christianity.

BOOK TWO: THE TENSION WITH CHRISTIANITY

CHAPTER FOUR: The Retreat From Reason: Educated Romans had at least made a serious attempt to construct a civilization based on reason, not myth. Then came Christianity, which claimed to bring light, hope, and truth - but its central myth was incredible, its dogma a mixture of older superstitions, and its sacred book an incoherent collection of primitive tales. Once the church had discarded its apocalyptic expectations, it settled down to the business of organizing a Christian community - eventually a rigid hierarchy.

1. The Adulteration of Antiquity: In the callous hands of Christians, Greek and Roman literature survived, but barely, and at great cost. The church fathers could not deal generously with secular literature - they were at war for a higher cause. However, there was a minority that maintained an interest - and Christian policy ran somewhere between these two extremes. The great compromise, in the fourth and fifth centuries, was to adapt from paganism whatever could be adapted to religious purposes and to throw the rest away. They invented pious meanings for secular passages, converting and allegorizing meanings - but at least it kept the classics from extinction, though at the price of covering them with pious legends. Cicero was persistently misread into the thirteenth century.

2. The Betrayal of Criticism: Medieval philosophers believed the advent of Jesus had subordinated the need for higher degrees of insight. Abelard devoted much of his ethical and theological speculation to the disappointing thought that his favorite pagan philosophers had been born too early for Christ, thus missing out on salvation. The philosophes saw this as despising and abusing the resources of the mind.

3. The Rehabilitation of Myth: In the Christian millennium, myth was preserved, transcended, and raised to a higher level. The philosophes liked to deride medieval categories as infantile or vicious, but the myths merely followed inevitably from the medieval mind bent on finding religious significance everywhere. Science was done, but like philosophy, it was guided by man's search for holiness and salvation. The enormous distance separating the philosophes from the medieval world view is proof that the Enlightenment was the terminal point of a long process of alienation that had begun centuries before, in the Renaissance.

CHAPTER FIVE: The Era of Pagan Christianity - For all their enormous but gradual contributions to secular thought, Europeans were still overwhelmingly religious - religious fervor attenuating slowly and uncertainly.

1. The Purification of the Sources: Humanists of the Renaissance began to correct the corrupt interpretations of the Greek and Roman philosophers. Many new manuscripts, stored in monastery libraries and guarded by monks, were uncovered, although covered with dust, torn, and mutilated. Unknown copies of Cicero, a single copy of Lucretius's "De Rerum Natura," a single copy of Catullus, and whatever we have of Tacitus were uncovered by persistent Humanist effort bordering at times on thievery. Gradually, classis after classic was reborn, and Humanist scholars purified them of the corrupt accretions of centuries. The veil of pious interpretation was pierced.

2. Ancients and Moderns - The Ancients: The protestant heresy persisted and thus stripped Christian Europe of one of its most tenacious myths, the myth of a Catholic commonwealth centered at Rome. Exploration discovered strange cultures which raised disturbing questions about the souls of heathens and the value of Christian civilization. The Copernican revolution in cosmology began to reverberate among educated men. The printing press and translations, the book trade, the growth of science, and the explosion of interest in accurate interpretations of ancient Greeks and Romans - all these things questioned the authority of the papacy. As Voltaire put it, "a corner of the veil was lifted. The nations, aroused, wanted to judge what they had worshipped."

3. Ancients and Moderns - The Moderns: By the force of its logic, science began to cut its ties with philosophy and to assume a posture at first equal, and then hostile, to theology - less by literary than by scientific means. Even so, the Church first took the findings of Gallileo, Boyle, and Newton as evidence of faith rather than as a threat. Locke called for liberation from the shackles of antique and medieval rules of thought and his impact was huge, the last in a long line of pagan Christians. The philosophes, arrogant as they were, still displayed great reverence for this Age of Genius.

CHAPTER SIX: In Dubious Battle

1. The Christian Component: Locke and his disciple, Toland, both wrote books in 1695 and 1696. Locke tried to prove that Christianity was acceptable to reasonable men; Toland, that what was mysterious and miraculous about Christianity must be discarded - and within those two years the essence of revealed, dogmatic religion evaporated. The philosophes took advantage, striving to maintain a separation between reason and religion while well-meaning Christians continued to try to unite them. This was the beginning of deism, which maintained a healthy respect for Jesus as a teacher, but held that his teachings were distinct from what resulted as the Christian religion.

2. The Treason of the Clerks: Clerical establishments didn't collapse, but every part of life became more secular - there was a subtle shift where religious institutions and religious explanations for events were slowly being displaced from the center of life to its periphery. The evidence for a growing critical rationalism among educated Christians is overwhelming, with a decline in religious fervor. They were thus open to the antireligious propaganda of the philosophes, as Sunday sermons simultaneously grew less severe and more accommodating to an easier life. As the Catholics, Lutherans, and Calvinists fought amongst themselves, the philosophes triumphed over them all.

CHAPTER SEVEN: Beyond the Holy Circle - the philosophes appropriated Christian labors for their own purposes.

1. The Abuse of Learning: This was a time of the beginnings of Biblical critical scholarship. Diderot, Voltaire, and Gibbon each took particular advantage of a different scholarly friend, and applied that scholarship where it could be devastating to Christianity. The philosophes were missionaries - for the sake of their calling they were ready to exploit the best their enemy had to offer, without mercy or gratitude.

2. The Mission of Lucretius: Lucretius was to Epicureus what the philosophes were to the Enlightenment - purveyors of savage, brutal, and relentless diatribes against superstition and religion. Religion retreated to the extent that philosophy and science advanced.

3. David Hume: The Complete Modern Pagan - Whatever misgivings the philosophes had about their passion, Hume had the least. He thought all houses of faith were houses of infection and that a rational man must escape, after exposing, the squabbles of theologians. His philosophy embodies the dialectic of the Enlightenment at its most ruthless. Without melodrama, Hume lived cheerfully and without complaining, with no supernatural justifications, demanding no complete explanations, no promise of permanent stability, with guides of merely probable validity. He was a cheerful Stoic.

As an intellectual history, "The Rise of Modern Paganism" has few peers. Peter Gay makes sense of a dizzying array of thinkers and their (often dissimilar or even opposing) thoughts. He shows, in prose both clear and elegant, that the Enlightenment was more a phenomenon than a program, albeit a phenomenon tied together by a love of inquiry and intellectual exploration.

This book is about the education of the intellectuals of the Enlightenment. While it is very interesting to trace how their minds developed - how they mastered and began to question the works of the masters of antiquity in a manner far more daring than the scholars of the Renaissance - it is so encylopediac that it impedes the narrative. In other words, I got bored and literally set it down for years. However, this is the work of a first-rate historian and so may have been too sophisticated for an amateur like me. (I like history, but this guy has READ EVERYTHING in the original, which I cannot.) Once I picked it up again, I did indeed enjoy it. Rather heavy handedly, Gay argues that what they concluded was that Christianity was a fiction and could not be true. Readers should know this. While I am somewhere on the spectrum between atheism and agnosticism, what I interpreted as Gay's atheism is even a bit too much for me.

I learned an immense amount about this period here, perhaps the most pivotal of the modern world. While a bit much, if taken in the right way it is a great guide to many of the debates that continue to this day and that originated with these intellectuals. However, I look forward to reading the next book, which is about what they did in a practical institutional sense rather than what and how they thought (covered by this first volume).

Recommended, but it is serious scholarly study rather than vacation reading!

Gay apparently spent several years on this book, and it shows in a work or painstaking and dramatic erudition. He provides, and clearly grasps, the context of the Enlightenment. To provide context in time he discusses the fall of classical paganism and the eclipse of reason in the Christian period. He covers the modes of thinking that arose during the Middle Ages and the elements of classical reason and creativity which are now increasingly accepted to have obtained during this traditionally dark episode of European history. He works through the rise of reason that had already started to occur with the Renaissance and on which the Enlightenment was built, indicating that the courage of the Enlightenment's revolution was not as visceral as it is sometimes portrayed; in effect, the Enlightenment philosophes were both surfing and fanning a wave whose relentless motion had already started, with the Church playing Canute before them.

To provide context in place he works through the sometimes startlingly bitter conflict in which the philosophes saw themselves as being engaged, a conflict for no less than the hearts and minds of all Western civilisation. They saw themselves, make no mistake, as in a struggle for survival with Christianity.

Here Gay is in my opinion almost too scrupulous, since he makes clear that the philosophes fought a tiger whose teeth were already falling out and thereby diminishes their courage, while at the same time impugning their fairness. Executions for blasphemy were not unknown in their Europe, but in practical effect the philosophes, and certainly the late philosophes, were not really in danger of their lives. For purely partisan reasons this almost leads me to dock a star off my rating, since this was a battle which had to be fought and from which we have all benefitted, while at the same time even now the beast of unreason stirs fitfully. Gay's philosophes were irascible, cantankerous and utterly combative, and regarded their battle too sententiously to be appealing as individuals. (Apart from the relentlessly cheerful Hume.) In fact, they remind me eerily of Richard Dawkins, which seems fittingly non-coincidental since he continues their battle.

As Gay indicates, this was the rise of modern paganism. Not the invention of paganism. Not the invention of reason. The Greeks and the Romans were there first. Not the invention of the social contract, nor the rights of man, nor the scientific method, nor the republic. All these grew from seeds already sown. What it was, instead, was the restoration and the ascendancy of these concepts. While we do not owe many concepts of Enlightenment thought fully to the originality of the philosophes of the Enlightenment, we owe it to them that these concepts and values have become so unquestioned a part of our world that the primacy of reason is barely noticed for the historical anomaly it is. This is no small debt.

Gay's work is of startling and prodigious erudition. It took me two tries to read it, the first time being unprepared for such a wealth of historical detail. On the second try, more widely read, I devoured the book with joy. Gay is fair, in my opinion sometimes too fair, and he gives the Christian adversaries of the Enlightenment much credit for reasonableness and for greater intellectual sophistication than the philosophes alleged. This made it all the more worth reading, since it forced me to justify my own parallel tendency to the same simplifications. At the same time he paints a more nuanced picture of the aggressive and sometimes devious nature of the philosophes than is customary. My distaste for the establishment tormentors remains undiminished but perhaps more subtly coloured. Gay's fairness is a challenge, and a greatly rewarding one at that.

Before I read The Enlightenment: The Rise of Modern Paganism and The Enlightenment: The Science of Freedom by Peter Gay, I had no idea that one could study the history of intellectual thought, even though I had read and studied almost all of the authors he discusses in detail in these seminal books.

Gay argues that there was in fact an Enlightenment (an issue hotly debated during my college years). The essential elements -- convergent rationalism, critical skepticism and anticlericalism -- created modern Western thought. Gay writes brilliantly, with great clarity, and his analyses of ancient and modern thinkers provided me with a number of important insights that my teachers and I had missed when reading the originals. Gay's bibliography is particularly illuminating.

Gay discusses the Greek and Roman philosophers in his first volume, and argues that thinkers of the Enlightment agreed wholeheartedly with Gibbons:

"If a man were called to fix the period in the history of the world, during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would, without hesitation, name that which elapsed from the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus."

At the same time, Gay is blunt in his judgments:

"History has been far from gentle with its hopes and predictions. The world has not turned out the way the philosophers wished, and half expected it would. Old fanaticisms have been more intractable, irrational forces more inventive than the philosophers were ready to conjecture.... Problems of race, of class of nationalism, or boredom and despair in the midst of plenty have emerged, almost in defiance of the philosopher's philosophy. We have known horrors, and may know horrors, that the men of the Enlightenment, did not see in their nightmares."

Gay does not, however, trace out the consequences of these philosophies but instead focuses on the study of the ideas themselves, and in particular the revolt of the philosophers against Chrisitanity and their return to classical (i.e. pagan) and secular thought.

Gay communicates the sense of excitement the men of the Enlightenment shared, a sense of adventure and daring. They were aware they were breaking with a thousand year old tradition with a great deal at stake.

I wished Gay had covered more ground in these two volumes; his modern Enlightment is limited to England, France and Germany in large measure, and ignores some intellectual leaders even in those countries like Gustavus of Sweden and Joseph of the Holy Roman Empire. In particular I would have liked to read his analysis of how the Enlightenment played out in the American colonies.

Nevertheless, this a splendid history, beautifully written, a truly exciting intellectual journey.

2009 Addendum

Peter Gay has been an important intellectual historian during my adult reading life. His "Enlightenment" reinforced and greatly enhanced my two years in college participating in the Integrated Liberal Studies program.

In the 1980s I was fascinated by Freud: A Life for Our Time, which was based primarily on original sources.

In the 1990s I browsed with great pleasure (but never studied seriously his five-volume "The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud."

I found his memoir, My German Question: Growing Up in Nazi Berlin, compelling and enlightening, and browsed with pleasure through Modernism: The Lure of Heresy, a survey of modernism in prose and poetry, music and dance, architecture and design, drama and the movies.

I feel very lucky to have had access to his works over these many years.

Robert C. Ross 1970 2009

Note: One of twelve NY Times "Editors' Choice" books for 1969; see first Comment.

I always knew i needed to read this foundational volume from the last generation, although i am a strong Christian traditionalist opponent of the so-called enlightenment.

I was surprised by how fair Prof. Gay was in deftly criticizing the philosophes, with whom he obviously agreed. He agrees that they have a specticism which amounts to a dogmatic religion. It is easy to be a critic, but most critics of pre and post enlightenment have no idea of the loving essence of Christianiy, merely cynically attacking clericalism. I love and will use Gay's phrase on p. 145, that the philosophes and their contemporary disciples are "secular fideists." I am glad that Gay shows how Jefferson and Franklin were influenced by one of the most radical pre-philosophes, Pierre Bayle. Some of Gay's best chapters concern how the clerics of the enlightenment, the treason of the clerics, were either asleep, or gave too much credit to their enemies. Gay concludes that "those who are amused are already half converted," so opponents of the enlightenment need to be amusing, as well as having a content which shows how negatively devastating the so called enlightenment has been to Western and American culture."

Two volumes in one, originally published in 1966 (The Appeal to Antiquity; The Tension with Christianity), these works combined in one volume are fundamental to any study of the the XVIIIth century and the Enlightenment.

There is one conspicuous and paradoxical omission. In more than 555 pages of text, notes and bibliography, professor Gay mentions Freemasonry only once - in citing the title of Lessing's masonic dialogue. The book is strewn with names of famous men long known to have been Masons without any attempt to show the contacts between them that the fraternity is known to facilitated. This serious flaw, by a Yale professor of history, has been corrected by Jacobs in her several books on Freemasonry and 18th century society. For a good start, see: Living the Enlightenment: Freemasonry and Politics in Eighteenth-Century Europe.

This inexplicable omission obscures the ubiquitous presence and impact Freemasonry had on XVIIIth century societies, forms of government as well as intellectual discourse and exchange. One example of how ignorance of Freemasonry's presence in eighteenth century affairs distorts an historical interpretation is found in Prof. Gay's labeling of Voltaire as an atheist. No atheist can be made a Mason. Three months before his death,Voltaire was initiated in the presence of Benjamin Franklin, at the Lodge of the Nine Sisters in Paris, on February 7, 1778.

Finally, a word of caution about the various exposés or monitors one may find about Freemasonry, whether online or in bookstores. Differences from jurisdiction to jurisdiction (Grand Lodge to Grand Lodge) and over time result in discrepancies in ritual wording and practice. As one who has examined visitors Masonically, I can tell you that even if one has read exposés, he will not be able to accurately perform convincingly unless he has actually been initiated. It simply is not possible to "crash" a Masonic meeting. Also, as the variety of books above attest, no one person speaks for Freemasonry.

Furthermore, even if one possesses an accurate monitor (to say nothing of the dangers of relying on a masonic cipher), the experience of the ritual is not the same as reading about it. Imagine the experiential difference between eating a cake and reading a recipe!