Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry Part 80

Civilizations have risen and perished, either by the anarchical insanity of Despotism, or by the despotic anarchy of Revolt.

To organize Anarchy, is the problem which the revolutionists have and will eternally have to resolve. It is the rock of Sisyphus that will always fall back upon them. To exist a single instant, they are and always will be by fatality reduced to improvise a despotism without other reason of existence than necessity, and which, consequently, is violent and blind as Necessity. We escape from the harmonious monarchy of Reason, only to fall under the irregular dictatorship of Folly.

Sometimes superst.i.tious enthusiasms, sometimes the miserable calculations of the materialist instinct have led astray the nations, and G.o.d at last urges the world on toward believing Reason and reasonable Beliefs.

We have had prophets enough without philosophy, and philosophers without religion; the blind believers and the skeptics resemble each other, and are as far the one as the other from the eternal salvation.

In the chaos of universal doubt and of the conflicts of Reason and Faith, the great men and Seers have been but infirm and morbid artists, seeking the beau-ideal at the risk and peril of their reason and life.

Living only in the hope to be crowned, they are the first to do what Pythagoras in so touching a manner prohibits in his admirable Symbols; they rend crowns, and tread them under foot.

Light is the equilibrium of Shadow and Lucidity.

Movement is the equilibrium of Inertia and Activity.

Authority is the equilibrium of Liberty and Power.

Wisdom is equilibrium in the Thoughts, which are the scintillations and rays of the Intellect.

Virtue is equilibrium in the Affections: Beauty is harmonious proportion in Forms.

The beautiful lives are the accurate ones, and the magnificences of Nature are an algebra of graces and splendors.

Everything just is beautiful; everything beautiful ought to be just.

There is, in fact, no Nothing, no void Emptiness, in the Universe. From the upper or outer surface of our atmosphere to that of the Sun, and to those of the Planets and remote Stars, in different directions, Science has for hundreds of centuries imagined that there was simple, void, empty s.p.a.ce. Comparing finite knowledge with the Infinite, the Philosophers know little more than the apes! In all that "void" s.p.a.ce are the Infinite Forces of G.o.d, acting in an infinite variety of directions, back and forth, and never for an instant inactive. In all of it, active through the whole of its Infinity, is the Light that is the Visible Manifestation of G.o.d. The earth and every other planet and sphere that is not a Centre of Light, carries its cone of shadow with it as it flies and flashes round in its...o...b..t; but the darkness has no _home_ in the Universe. To illuminate the sphere on one side, is to project a cone of darkness on the other; and Error also is the Shadow of the Truth with which G.o.d illuminates the Soul.

In all that "Void," also, is the Mysterious and ever Active Electricity, and Heat, and the Omnipresent Ether. At the will of G.o.d the Invisible becomes Visible. Two invisible gases, combined by the action of a Force of G.o.d, and compressed, become and remain the water that fills the great basins of the seas, flows in the rivers and rivulets, leaps forth from the rocks or springs, drops upon the earth in rains, or whitens it with snows, and bridges the Danubes with ice, or gathers in vast reservoirs in the earth's bosom. G.o.d manifested fills all the extension that we foolishly call Empty s.p.a.ce and the Void.

And everywhere in the Universe, what we call Life and Movement results from a continual conflict of Forces or Impulses. Whenever that active antagonism ceases, the immobility and inertia, which are Death, result.

If, says the Kabalah, the Justice of G.o.d, which is Severity or the Female, alone reigned, creation of imperfect beings such as man would from the beginning have been impossible, because Sin being congenital with Humanity, the Infinite Justice, measuring the Sin by the Infinity of the G.o.d offended against, must have annihilated Humanity at the instant of its creation; and not only Humanity but the Angels, since these also, like all created by G.o.d and less than perfect, are sinful.

Nothing imperfect would have been possible. If, on the other hand, the Mercy or Benignity of G.o.d, the Male, were in no wise counteracted, Sin would go unpunished, and the Universe fall into a chaos of corruption.

Let G.o.d but repeal a single principle or law of chemical attraction or sympathy, and the antagonistic forces equilibrated in matter, released from constraint, would instantaneously expand all that we term matter into impalpable and invisible gases, such as water or steam is, when, confined in a cylinder and subjected to an immense degree of that mysterious force of the Deity which we call "heat," it is by its expansion released.

Incessantly the great currents and rivers of air flow and rush and roll from the equator to the frozen polar regions, and back from these to the torrid equatorial realms. Necessarily incident to these great, immense, equilibrated and beneficent movements, caused by the antagonism of equatorial heat and polar cold, are the typhoons, tornadoes, and cyclones that result from conflicts between the rushing currents. These and the benign trade-winds result from the same great law. G.o.d is omnipotent; but effects without causes are impossible, and these effects cannot but sometimes be evil. The fire would not warm, if it could not also burn, the human flesh. The most virulent poisons are the most sovereign remedies, when given in due proportion. The Evil is the shadow of the Good, and inseparable from it.

The Divine Wisdom limits by equipoise the Omnipotence of the Divine Will or Power, and the result is Beauty or Harmony. The arch rests not on a single column, but springs from one on either side. So is it also with the Divine Justice and Mercy, and with the Human Reason and Human Faith.

That purely scholastic Theology, issue of the Categories of Aristotle and of the Sentences of Peter Lombard, that logic of the syllogism which argues instead of reasoning, and finds a response to every thing by subtilizing on terms, wholly ignored the Kabalastic dogma and wandered off into the drear vacuity of darkness. It was less a philosophy or a wisdom than a philosophical automaton, replying by means of springs, and uncoiling its theses like a wheeled movement. It was not the human verb but the monotonous cry of a machine, the inanimate speech of an Androd.

It was the fatal precision of mechanism, instead of a free application of rational necessities. ST. THOMAS AQUINAS crushed with a single blow all this scaffolding of words built one upon the other, by proclaiming the eternal Empire of Reason, in that magnificent sentence, "_A thing is not just because_ G.o.d _wills it; but_ G.o.d _wills it because it is just_." The proximate consequence of this proposition, arguing from the greater to the less, was this: "_A thing is not true because_ ARISTOTLE _has said it; but_ ARISTOTLE _could not reasonably say it unless it was true. Seek then, first of all, the_ TRUTH _and_ JUSTICE, _and the Science of_ ARISTOTLE _will be given you in addition_."

It is the fine dream of the greatest of the Poets, that h.e.l.l, become useless, is to be closed at length, by the aggrandizement of Heaven; that the problem of Evil is to receive its final solution, and Good alone, necessary and triumphant, is to reign in Eternity. So the Persian dogma taught that AHRIMAN and his subordinate ministers of Evil were at last, by means of a Redeemer and Mediator, to be reconciled with Deity, and all Evil to end. But unfortunately, the philosopher forgets all the laws of equilibrium, and seeks to absorb the Light in a splendor without shadow, and movement in an absolute repose that would be the cessation of life. So long as there shall be a visible light, there will be a shadow proportional to this Light, and whatever is illuminated will cast its cone of shadow. Repose will never be happiness, if it is not balanced by an a.n.a.logous and contrary movement. This is the immutable law of Nature, the Eternal Will of the JUSTICE which is G.o.d.

The same reason necessitates Evil and Sorrow in Humanity, which renders indispensable the bitterness of the waters of the seas. Here also, Harmony can result only from the a.n.a.logy of contraries, and what is above exists by reason of what is below. It is the depth that determines the height; and if the valleys are filled up, the mountains disappear: so, if the shadows are effaced, the Light is annulled, which is only visible by the graduated contrast of gloom and splendor, and universal obscurity will be produced by an immense dazzling. Even the colors in the Light only exist by the presence of the shadow: it is the threefold alliance of the day and night, the luminous image of the dogma, the Light made Shadow, as the Saviour is the Logos made man: and all this reposes on the same law, the primary law of creation, the single and absolute law of Nature, that of the distinction and harmonious ponderation of the contrary forces in the universal equipoise.

The two great columns of the Temple that symbolizes the Universe are Necessity, or the omnipotent Will of G.o.d, which nothing can disobey, and Liberty, or the free-will of His creatures. Apparently and to our human reason antagonistic, the same Reason is not incapable of comprehending how they can be in equipoise. The Infinite Power and Wisdom could so plan the Universe and the Infinite Succession of things as to leave man free to act, and, foreseeing what each would at every instant think and do, to make of the free-will and free-action of each an instrument to aid in effecting its general purpose. For even a man, foreseeing that another will do a certain act, and in nowise controlling or even influencing him may use that action as an instrument to effect his own purposes.

The Infinite Wisdom of G.o.d foresees what each will do, and uses it as an instrument, by the exertion of His Infinite Power, which yet does not control the Human action so as to annihilate its freedom. The result is Harmony, the third column that upholds the Lodge. The same Harmony results from the equipoise of Necessity and Liberty. The will of G.o.d is not for an instant defeated nor thwarted, and this is the Divine Victory; and yet He does not tempt nor constrain men to do Evil, and thus His Infinite Glory is unimpaired. The result is Stability, Cohesion, and Permanence in the Universe, and undivided Dominion and Autocracy in the Deity. And these, Victory, Glory, Stability, and Dominion, are the last four Sephiroth of the Kabalah.

I AM, G.o.d said to Moses, that which Is, Was and Shall forever Be. But the Very G.o.d, in His unmanifested Essence, conceived of as not yet having created and as Alone, has no Name. Such was the doctrine of all the ancient Sages, and it is so expressly declared in the Kabalah.

[Hebrew: ????] is the Name of the Deity manifested in a single act, that of Creation, and containing within Himself, in idea and actuality, the whole Universe, to be invested with form and be materially developed during the eternal succession of ages. As G.o.d never WAS NOT, so He never THOUGHT not, and the Universe has no more had a beginning than the Divine Thought of which it is the utterance,--no more than the Deity Himself. The duration of the Universe is but a point halfway upon the infinite line of eternity; and G.o.d was not inert and uncreative during the eternity that stretches behind that point. The Archetype of the Universe did never not exist in the Divine Mind. The Word was in the BEGINNING with G.o.d, and WAS G.o.d. And the Ineffable NAME is that, not of the Very Essence but of the Absolute, manifested as Being or Existence.

For Existence or Being, said the Philosophers, is limitation; and the Very Deity is not limited nor defined, but is all that _may possibly be_, besides all that is, was, and shall be.

Reversing the letters of the Ineffable Name, and dividing it, it becomes bi-s.e.xual, as the word [Hebrew: ??], _Yud-He_ or JAH is, and discloses the meaning of much of the obscure language of the Kabalah, and is The Highest of which the Columns Jachin and Boaz are the symbol. "In the image of Deity," we are told, "G.o.d created the Man; Male and Female created He _them_:" and the writer, symbolizing the Divine by the Human, then tells us that the woman, at first contained in the man, was taken from his side. So Minerva, G.o.ddess of Wisdom, was born, a woman and in armor, of the brain of Jove; Isis was the sister before she was the wife of Osiris, and within BRAHM, the Source of all, the Very G.o.d, without s.e.x or name, was developed MAYA, the Mother of all that is. The WORD is the First and Only-begotten of the Father; and the awe with which the Highest Mysteries were regarded has imposed silence in respect to the Nature of the Holy Spirit. The Word is Light, and the Life of Humanity.

It is for the Adepts to understand the meaning of the Symbols.

Return now, with us, to the Degrees of the Blue Masonry, and for your last lesson, receive the explanation of one of their Symbols.

You see upon the altar of those Degrees the SQUARE and the COMPa.s.s, and you remember how they lay upon the altar in each Degree.

The SQUARE is an instrument adapted for plane surfaces only, and therefore appropriate to Geometry, or measurement of the Earth, which appears to be, and was by the Ancients supposed to be, a plane. The COMPa.s.s is an instrument that has relation to spheres and spherical surfaces, and is adapted to spherical trigonometry, or that branch of mathematics which deals with the Heavens and the orbits of the planetary bodies.

The SQUARE, therefore, is a natural and appropriate Symbol of this Earth and the things that belong to it, are of it, or concern it. The Compa.s.s is an equally natural and appropriate Symbol of the Heavens, and of all celestial things and celestial natures.

You see at the beginning of this reading, an old Hermetic Symbol, copied from the "MATERIA PRIMA" of Valentinus, printed at Franckfurt, in 1613, with a treatise ent.i.tled "AZOTH." Upon it you see a Triangle upon a Square, both of these contained in a circle; and above this, standing upon a dragon, a human body, with two arms only, but two heads, one male and the other female. By the side of the male head is the Sun, and by that of the female head, the Moon, the crescent within the circle of the full moon. And the hand on the _male_ side holds a _Compa.s.s_, and that on the _female_ side, a _Square_.

The Heavens and the Earth were personified as Deities, even among the Aryan Ancestors of the European nations of the Hindus, Zends, Bactrians, and Persians; and the Rig Veda Sanhita contains hymns addressed to them as G.o.ds. They were deified also among the Phnicians; and among the Greeks OURANOS and GEA, Heaven and Earth, were sung as the most ancient of the Deities, by Hesiod.

It is the great, fertile, beautiful MOTHER, Earth, that produces, with limitless profusion of beneficence, everything that ministers to the needs, to the comfort, and to the luxury of man. From her teeming and inexhaustible bosom come, the fruits, the grain, the flowers, in their season. From it comes all that feeds the animals which serve man as laborers and for food. She, in the fair Springtime, is green with abundant gra.s.s, and the trees spring from her soil, and from her teeming vitality take their wealth of green leaves. In her womb are found the useful and valuable minerals; hers are the seas the swarm with life; hers the rivers that furnish food and irrigation, and the mountains that send down the streams which swell into these rivers; hers the forests that feed the sacred fires for the sacrifices, and blaze upon the domestic hearths. The EARTH, therefore, the great PRODUCER, was always represented as a _female_, as the MOTHER,--Great, Bounteous, Beneficent Mother Earth.

On the other hand, it is the light and heat of the Sun in the Heavens, and the rains that seem to come from them, that in the Springtime make fruitful this bountifully-producing Earth, that restore life and warmth to her veins, chilled by Winter, set running free her streams, and _beget_, as it were, that greenness and that abundance of which she is so prolific. As the procreative and generative agents, the Heavens and the Sun have always been regarded as _male_; as the generators that fructify the Earth and cause it to produce.

The Hermaphroditic figure is the Symbol of the double nature anciently a.s.signed to the Deity, as Generator and Producer, as BRAHM and MAYA among the Aryans, Osiris and Isis among the Egyptians. As the Sun was male, so the Moon was female; and Isis was both the sister and the wife of Osiris. The Compa.s.s, therefore, is the Hermetic Symbol of the Creative Deity, and the Square of the productive Earth or Universe.

From the Heavens come the spiritual and immortal portion of man; from the Earth his material and mortal portion. The Hebrew Genesis says that YEHOUAH formed man of the dust of the Earth, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life. Through the seven planetary spheres, represented by the Mystic Ladder of the Mithriac Initiations, and it by that which Jacob saw in his dream (not with _three_, but with _seven_ steps), the Souls, emanating from the Deity, descended, to be united to their human bodies; and through those seven spheres they must re-ascend, to return to their origin and home in the bosom of the Deity.

The COMPa.s.s, therefore, as the Symbol of the _Heavens_, represents the spiritual, intellectual, and moral portion of this double nature of Humanity; and the SQUARE, as the Symbol of the _Earth_, its material, sensual, and baser portion.

"Truth and Intelligence," said one of the Ancient Indian Sects of Philosophers, "are the Eternal attributes of G.o.d, not of the individual Soul, which is susceptible both of knowledge and ignorance, of pleasure and pain; therefore G.o.d and the individual Soul are distinct:" and this expression of the ancient Nyaya Philosophers, in regard to Truth, has been handed down to us through the long succession of ages, in the lessons of Freemasonry, wherein we read, that "Truth is a Divine Attribute, and the foundation of every virtue."

"While embodied in matter," they said, "the Soul is in a state of imprisonment, and is under the influence of evil pa.s.sions; but having, by intense study, arrived at the knowledge of the elements and principles of Nature, it attains unto the place of THE ETERNAL; in which state of happiness, its individuality does not cease."

The vitality which animates the mortal frame, the Breath of Life of the Hebrew Genesis, the Hindu Philosophers in general held, perishes with it; but the Soul is divine, an emanation of the Spirit of G.o.d, but not a _portion_ of that Spirit. For they compared it to the heat and light sent forth from the Sun, or to a _ray_ of that light, which neither lessens nor divides its own essence.

However created, or invested with separate existence, the Soul, which is but the creature of the Deity, cannot know the mode of its creation, nor comprehend its own individuality. It cannot even comprehend how the being which it and the body const.i.tute, can feel pain, or see, or hear.

It has pleased the Universal Creator to set bounds to the scope of our human and finite reason, beyond which it cannot reach; and if we are capable of comprehending the mode and manner of the creation or generation of the Universe of things, He has been pleased to conceal it from us by an impenetrable veil, while the words used to express the act have no other definite meaning than that He caused that Universe to commence to exist.

It is enough for us to know, what Masonry teaches, that we are not all mortal; that the Soul or Spirit, the intellectual and reasoning portion of ourself, is our Very Self, is not subject to decay and dissolution, but is simple and immaterial, survives the death of the body, and is _capable_ of immortality; that it is also capable of improvement and advancement, of increase of knowledge of the things that are divine, of becoming wiser and better, and more and more worthy of immortality; and that to become so, and to help to improve and benefit others and all our race, is the n.o.blest ambition and highest glory that we can entertain and attain unto, in this momentary and imperfect life.

In every human being the Divine and the Human are intermingled. In every one there are the Reason and the Moral sense, the pa.s.sions that prompt to evil, and the sensual appet.i.tes. "If ye live after the flesh, ye shall die," said Paul, writing to the Christians at Rome, "but if ye through the spirit do mortify the deeds of the body, ye shall live. For as many as are led by the Spirit of G.o.d, they are the sons of G.o.d." "The flesh l.u.s.teth against the spirit, and the spirit against the flesh," he said, writing to the Christians of Galatia, "and these are contrary the one to the other, so that ye cannot do the things that ye would." "That which I do, I do not willingly do," he wrote to the Romans, "for what I wish to do, that I do not do, but that which I hate I do. It is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me. To will, is present with me; but how to perform that which is good, I find not. For, I do not do the good that I desire to do; and the evil that I do not wish to do, that I do. I find then a _law_, that when I desire to do good, evil is present with me; for I delight in the law of G.o.d after the inward man, but I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members ...

So then, with the mind I myself serve the law of G.o.d, but with the flesh the law of sin."

Life is a battle, and to fight that battle heroically and well is the great purpose of every man's existence, who is worthy and fit to live at all. To stem the strong currents of adversity, to advance in despite of all obstacles, to s.n.a.t.c.h victory from the jealous grasp of fortune, to become a chief and a leader among men, to rise to rank and power by eloquence, courage, perseverance, study, energy, activity, discouraged by no reverses, impatient of no delays, deterred by no hazards; to win wealth, to subjugate men by our intellect, the very elements by our audacity, to succeed, to prosper, to thrive;--thus it is, according to the general understanding, that one fights well the battle of life. Even to succeed in business by that boldness which halts for no risks, that audacity which stakes all upon hazardous chances; by the shrewdness of the close dealer, the boldness of the unscrupulous operator, even by the knaveries of the stock-board and the gold-room; to crawl up into place by disreputable means or the votes of brutal ignorance,--these also are deemed to be among the great successes of life.