Ritual , Secrecy , and Civil Society
“ conjugal recognition ” or “ masonic marriage ”, “ funereal handling ” or “ masonic obsequies ” – are in origin directly descended from Theophilanthropy . From the aftermath of the Revolution and up until 1877 , the Grand Orient de France considered Freemasonry as the incarnation of natural religion , and considered itself a deist church . In some cases , consciously and for the most part unconsciously , it presented itself as the continuation of Theophilanthropy . And 1877 did not mark , as it is sometimes suggested , a break with traditional Judeo-Christian Freemasonry , but a handover from the older generation professing the rational deism of Voltaire and the Revolution , to the new generation of the 1860s , who were disciples of the rational agnosticism of Auguste Comte .
Theophilanthropy had wanted to be a religion reduced to the essential principles of the religious . Freemasonry of the nineteenth century was profoundly marked by the religious heritage of the Revolution , and for many it certainly was – at that time at least – a religion reduced to principles .
The last of the Theophilanthropists were still trying to gather for their worship on 20 Vendémiaire Year X ( October 12 , 1801 ). By order of the government , they were forbidden access to their temples and asked to disperse . After some protestation and vain attempts at approaching the First Consul , who had at one time been quite closely linked to La Revellière-Lépeaux , the purest cult of the natural religion was buried in obscurity . The Theophilanthropists preached tolerance . They proclaimed from the pulpit – professing this religion on which all men could agree – that they were friends to all faiths . They were nonetheless considered , by deeply Catholic France , as the religious arm of the Revolution and the enemy to be defeated . The historic episode of Theophilanthropy may seem picturesque and anecdotal , but it nonetheless reveals structural elements of the religious and political history of our country . While in Great Britain and the Anglo-Saxon world , deism fits into the continuity of Christianity and appears as a prolonged Unitarianism , in France both in the domain of ideas and in the domain of history , deism is a break with Christianity and clearly fits into the critical camp of rationalism and the Enlightenment . It is probably this philosophical and religious context that explains in part the evolution of Freemasonry in the final third of the nineteenth century .
Appendix 1 Voltaire ’ s Prayer 30
So it is no longer to men that I address myself , it is to you , God of all beings , of all worlds and of all times . If it is permitted for weak creatures lost in the vastness and imperceptible to the rest of the universe to dare to demand anything of you , you who have given everything , you whose decrees are as immutable as they are eternal , then deign to look with pity on the mistakes attached to our nature , and do not let these mistakes become our calamities . You have not given us a heart to hate ourselves , or hands to kill ourselves . Make it so that we mutually aid each other to bear the burden of a painful and transitory life ; that the small differences in the clothes which cover our foolish bodies , in all our inadequate languages , in all our ridiculous customs , in all our imperfect laws , in all our senseless opinions , in all our conditions so disproportionate in our eyes , and so equal before you ; that all these little nuances that
30
Voltaire , Traité sur la tolérance à l ’ occasion de la mort de Jean Calas ( 1763 ), extract from Chapter XXIII . 11