and dialectical view of secrecy. To him secrecy is not just another cultural or political expression, but is deeply rooted in the history and the prehistory of mankind, as, in his own words,“ einen Gegenstand des grauen Alterthums”.
Moreover, in the letters against Nicolai he often expresses rather favorable inclination to the idea of selecting a group of men,“ die Vornehmsten, Brauchbarsten, Ersten”, and organizing them in a society: 9 Ich will es glauben, dass in einem so großen Orden, wo viele wackre Glieder waren, vielleicht auch aufgeklärte Glieder gewesen: es kann beinahe nicht anders seyn, als dass ihre Bekanntschaft mit den Saracenen, vielleicht auch in einigen Ländern Europens mit den Albigensern, Stedingern, und wie die Ketzer weiter genannt wurden, die Begriffe mancher Ritter geläutert und über den Pöbel der herrschenden Kirche erhoben habe. Verschiedene Lebensweise, Reisen, Kenntnis anderer Länder und Partheien, geben inbesonderheit tapfern Leuten eine Art Unpartheilichkeit und allgemeiner Uebersicht, die eingeschlossene Mönche und disputierende Gelehrte wohl nicht haben konnten 10.
This is indeed a very interesting passage, especially the final reference to the ideals of Unpartheilichkeit und allgemeiner Uebersicht. At the end of his fierce attack on Nicolai’ s book Herder ends up formulating an almost utopian ideal – of a kind of men who through their experience with other peoples and other cultures has developed a generality of knowledge and an openness of mind that not only sets them apart from the mob –“ den Pöbel der Kirche” – but even from the scholars and monks studying, collecting their knowledge behind closed doors. And this – we should add – is also a function of secrecy. According to the argument I am making here this is what really interests Herder in Freemasonry and in the secret societies: the opportunity to create, to build – in the full German sense of bilden – groups, societies of men who are not“ eingeschlossen” – locked up – like monks, in their religious, cultural and national contexts, but who are fundamentally open-minded, liberal and cosmopolitan. The function of secrecy then, is to free these people from the political and religious forces controlling them, from their duties and allegiances to the state and the church. Hence, this protective function, this“ schützende Funktion”, to use Koselleck’ s term, is to Herder not an end in itself, but a means of creating the space necessary to bring about a reorientation, from the small world of the monastry or the principality, to the bigger world of the nation, the continent, the globe. However, in his own time, not least in Nicolai’ s book on the Templars, Herder can observe how the function of secrecy has become an end in itself, how function becomes content, how members of Masonic lodges become more interested in the rituals and the levels of initiations than in educating themselves and others in openmindedness and cosmopolitanism. This could – in my opinion – partly explain Herder’ s ambivalent attitude towards Freemasonry. Furthermore, in more or less all his relevant texts Herder faces the question if the strategies of secrecy are not outdated,“ unzeitgemäß”, if we have not reached a level of Enlightenment when their“ protective function” is in fact not needed anymore. Obviously, the strategies of secrecy are not in accordance with the fundamental ideals of Enlightenment. Hence, Herder is constantly
9
15, s. 100
10 s. 110
54