Editing Age of Enlightenment (section)

===Masonic lodges===
[[File:Freimaurer Initiation.jpg|thumb|Masonic initiation ceremony]]

Historians have debated the extent to which the secret network of [[Freemasonry]] was a main factor in the Enlightenment.<ref>{{cite book |author1-last=Crow |author1-first=Matthew |author2-last=Jacob |author2-first=Margaret |author2-link=Margaret Jacob |year=2014 |chapter=Freemasonry and the Enlightenment |editor1-last=Bodgan |editor1-first=Henrik |editor2-last=Snoek |editor2-first=Jan A. M. |title=Handbook of Freemasonry |location=[[Leiden]] |publisher=[[Brill Publishers]] |series=Brill Handbooks on Contemporary Religion |volume=8 |doi=10.1163/9789004273122_008 |pages=100–116 |isbn=978-90-04-21833-8 |issn=1874-6691}}</ref> Leaders of the Enlightenment included Freemasons such as Diderot, Montesquieu, Voltaire, [[Gotthold Ephraim Lessing|Lessing]], Pope,<ref>Maynard Mack, ''Alexander Pope: A Life,'' Yale University Press, 1985 p. 437–440. Pope, a Catholic, was a Freemason in 1730, eight years before membership was prohibited by the Catholic Church (1738). Pope's name is on the membership list of the Goat Tavern Lodge (p. 439). Pope's name appears on a 1723 list and a 1730 list.</ref> Horace Walpole, Sir Robert Walpole, Mozart, Goethe, Frederick the Great, Benjamin Franklin<ref>{{cite book |first={{nowrap|J. A.}} Leo |last=Lemay |title=The Life of Benjamin Franklin, Volume 2: Printer and Publisher, 1730–1747 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=KOhKqgMD10cC&pg=PA83 |year=2013 |publisher=University of Pennsylvania Press |pages=83–92 |isbn=978-0-8122-0929-7}}</ref> and George Washington.<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Bullock |first1=Steven C. |year=1996 |title=Initiating the Enlightenment?: Recent Scholarship on European Freemasonry |journal=Eighteenth-Century Life |volume=20 |issue=1 |page=81}}</ref> Norman Davies said Freemasonry was a powerful force on behalf of liberalism in Europe from about 1700 to the twentieth century. It expanded during the Enlightenment, reaching practically every country in Europe. It was especially attractive to powerful aristocrats and politicians as well as intellectuals, artists, and political activists.<ref>Norman Davies, ''Europe: A History'' (1996) pp. 634–635</ref>

During the Enlightenment, Freemasons comprised an international network of like-minded men, often meeting in secret in ritualistic programs at their lodges. They promoted the ideals of the Enlightenment and helped diffuse these values across Britain, France, and other places. Freemasonry as a systematic creed with its own myths, values, and rituals originated in Scotland {{circa|1600}} and spread to England and then across the Continent in the 18th century. They fostered new codes of conduct—including a communal understanding of liberty and equality inherited from guild sociability—"liberty, fraternity, and equality."<ref>Margaret C. Jacob's seminal work on Enlightenment freemasonry, Margaret C. Jacob, ''Living the Enlightenment: Free masonry and Politics in Eighteenth-Century Europe'' (Oxford University Press, 1991) p. 49.</ref> Scottish soldiers and Jacobite Scots brought to the Continent ideals of fraternity, which reflected not the local system of Scottish customs, but the institutions and ideals originating in the English Revolution against royal absolutism.<ref>Margaret C. Jacob, "Polite worlds of Enlightenment," in Martin Fitzpatrick and Peter Jones, eds. ''The Enlightenment World'' (Routledge, 2004) pp. 272–287.</ref> Freemasonry was particularly prevalent in France—by 1789, there were perhaps as many as 100,000 French Masons, making Freemasonry the most popular of all Enlightenment associations.<ref>Roche, 436.</ref> The Freemasons displayed a passion for secrecy and created new degrees and ceremonies. Similar societies, partially imitating Freemasonry, emerged in France, Germany, Sweden, and Russia. One example was the [[Illuminati]], founded in Bavaria in 1776, which was copied after the Freemasons, but was never part of the movement. The name itself translates to "[[wikt:illuminato#Italian|enlightened]]," chosen to reflect their [[Illuminati#Origins|original intent]] to promote the values of the movement. The Illuminati was an overtly political group, which most Masonic lodges decidedly were not.<ref>Fitzpatrick and Jones, eds. ''The Enlightenment World'' p. 281</ref>

Masonic lodges created a private model for public affairs. They "reconstituted the polity and established a constitutional form of self-government, complete with constitutions and laws, elections, and representatives." In other words, the micro-society set up within the lodges constituted a normative model for society as a whole. This was especially true on the continent: when the first lodges began to appear in the 1730s, their embodiment of British values was often seen as threatening by state authorities. For example, the Parisian lodge that met in the mid 1720s was composed of English [[Jacobitism|Jacobite]] exiles.<ref>Jacob, pp. 20, 73, 89.</ref> Furthermore, freemasons across Europe explicitly linked themselves to the Enlightenment as a whole. For example, in French lodges the line "As the means to be enlightened I search for the enlightened" was a part of their initiation rites. British lodges assigned themselves the duty to "initiate the unenlightened." This did not necessarily link lodges to the irreligious, but neither did this exclude them from the occasional heresy. In fact, many lodges praised the Grand Architect, the masonic terminology for the deistic divine being who created a scientifically ordered universe.<ref>Jacob, 145–47.</ref>

German historian Reinhart Koselleck claimed: "On the Continent there were two social structures that left a decisive imprint on the Age of Enlightenment: the Republic of Letters and the Masonic lodges."<ref>Reinhart Koselleck, ''[[Critique and Crisis]],'' p. 62, (The MIT Press, 1988)</ref> Scottish professor Thomas Munck argues that "although the Masons did promote international and cross-social contacts which were essentially non-religious and broadly in agreement with enlightened values, they can hardly be described as a major radical or reformist network in their own right."<ref>Thomas Munck, 1994, p. 70.</ref> Many of the Masons values seemed to greatly appeal to Enlightenment values and thinkers. Diderot discusses the link between Freemason ideals and the enlightenment in D'Alembert's Dream, exploring masonry as a way of spreading enlightenment beliefs.<ref>{{cite web |url=https://www.stmarys-ca.edu/sites/default/files/attachments/files/Dalemberts_Dream.pdf |last=Diderot |first=Denis |title=D'Alembert's Dream |year=1769 |access-date=17 November 2014 |archive-date=29 November 2014 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20141129024943/https://www.stmarys-ca.edu/sites/default/files/attachments/files/Dalemberts_Dream.pdf |url-status=dead}}</ref> Historian Margaret Jacob stresses the importance of the Masons in indirectly inspiring enlightened political thought.<ref>Margaret C. Jacob, ''Living the Enlightenment: Freemasonry and politics in eighteenth-century Europe'' (Oxford University Press, 1991.)</ref> On the negative side, [[Daniel Roche (historian)|Daniel Roche]] contests claims that Masonry promoted egalitarianism and he argues the lodges only attracted men of similar social backgrounds.<ref>Roche, 437.</ref> The presence of noble women in the French "lodges of adoption" that formed in the 1780s was largely due to the close ties shared between these lodges and aristocratic society.<ref>Jacob, 139. See also Janet M. Burke, "Freemasonry, Friendship and Noblewomen: The Role of the Secret Society in Bringing Enlightenment Thought to Pre-Revolutionary Women Elites," ''History of European Ideas'' 10 no. 3 (1989): 283–94.</ref>

The major opponent of Freemasonry was the Catholic Church so in countries with a large Catholic element, such as France, Italy, Spain, and Mexico, much of the ferocity of the political battles involve the confrontation between what Davies calls the reactionary Church and enlightened Freemasonry.<ref>Davies, ''Europe: A History'' (1996) pp. 634–635</ref><ref>Richard Weisberger et al., eds., ''Freemasonry on both sides of the Atlantic: essays concerning the craft in the British Isles, Europe, the United States, and Mexico'' (2002)</ref> Even in France, Masons did not act as a group.<ref>Robert R. Palmer, ''The Age of the Democratic Revolution: The Struggle'' (1970) p. 53</ref> American historians, while noting that Benjamin Franklin and [[George Washington]] were indeed active Masons, have downplayed the importance of Freemasonry in causing the American Revolution because the Masonic order was non-political and included both Patriots and their enemy the Loyalists.<ref>Neil L. York, "Freemasons and the American Revolution," ''The Historian'' Volume: 55. Issue: 2. 1993, pp. 315+.</ref>