of their origin in late 1730s France. Furthermore it shows a tendency of the editors of Freemason’s Magazine, who were apparently of the opinion that Ramsay’s thoughts mirrored the influence of freemasonry on society. Given that one of the most prominent representatives of German radical Enlightenment, Wieland, in his essay on the Order of Cosmopolitans fifty years after Ramsay’s oration (and six years before the first reprint of Ramsay in London) repeats some of its central ideas, it cannot be underestimated. Again it must be emphasised that Ramsay was not original in the sense that he invented the concepts in his oration (although I would like to see the idea of crusaders as the “new people” and the petition for an encyclopaedia to which all people contribute, in print or even manuscript, before 1737), but he surely was one of the earlier representatives, crystallising these ideas. Wieland’s essay on the Cosmopolitans is not printed for a masonic audience but reflects the discourse of a time that was disappointed with the turn that the first masonic, truly European, endeavour had taken. The rise and fall of the Strict Observance was one of the most traumatic events for those who had hoped that a new timefor a trans- national community – at leastamong European intellectuals – would arrive. This disappointment explains to a large extent the emergence of theIlluminati–to whichWieland disappointment explains to a large extent the emergence of the Illuminati – to which Wieland most certainly and leading Vienna freemasons most definitely belonged. In the aftermath of the French Revolution and the subsequent Napoleonic Wars there grew a resistance against an entirely rational definition of world citizenship. Napoleon’s dominion over Europe was perceived as a threat of a universalising force able to erase some of the continent’s core values. Faced with the destruction of a political order that had given sense to theGerman-speaking states since its foundationby Charles Magne in the 9th


century, the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation – finally dissolved by Napoleon in 1806 and thus erasing the Peace of Westphalia of 1648 as the framework of European statehood – Novalis attempted to secure at least the concept of “Holiness” for a new cosmopolitan vision of Europe. Opposing the “sacred” with the “secular” he invented abasic dialectic pattern of world explanation (as later developed in Hegelianism and Marxism) and saw in their synthesis a dream of the future unity of humankind: the secular is reconciled with the sacred in the lodge, receiving there the kiss of brotherhood. Ramsay’s oration contains the nucleus for two forms of world citizenship, one based upon rational principles and the other founded upon spiritual values. Both


readings of cosmopolitanism, in a rational and an ideal sense, are possible within fundamental texts of freemasonry.


84


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49  |  Page 50  |  Page 51  |  Page 52  |  Page 53  |  Page 54  |  Page 55  |  Page 56  |  Page 57  |  Page 58  |  Page 59  |  Page 60  |  Page 61  |  Page 62  |  Page 63  |  Page 64  |  Page 65  |  Page 66  |  Page 67  |  Page 68  |  Page 69  |  Page 70  |  Page 71  |  Page 72  |  Page 73  |  Page 74  |  Page 75  |  Page 76  |  Page 77  |  Page 78  |  Page 79  |  Page 80  |  Page 81  |  Page 82  |  Page 83  |  Page 84  |  Page 85  |  Page 86  |  Page 87  |  Page 88  |  Page 89  |  Page 90  |  Page 91  |  Page 92  |  Page 93  |  Page 94  |  Page 95  |  Page 96  |  Page 97  |  Page 98  |  Page 99  |  Page 100  |  Page 101  |  Page 102  |  Page 103  |  Page 104  |  Page 105  |  Page 106  |  Page 107  |  Page 108  |  Page 109  |  Page 110  |  Page 111  |  Page 112  |  Page 113  |  Page 114  |  Page 115  |  Page 116  |  Page 117  |  Page 118  |  Page 119  |  Page 120  |  Page 121  |  Page 122  |  Page 123  |  Page 124  |  Page 125  |  Page 126  |  Page 127  |  Page 128  |  Page 129  |  Page 130