Thomas Paine and the Freemasons[1]
Shai Afsai
[Reprinted from the
Bulletin of Thomas Paine Friends, Summer 2011]
What was Thomas Paine's connection with the Masonic Order? In Thomas
Paine: Apostle of Freedom, Jack Fruchtman writes that there is
insufficient evidence to answer this with certainty: "It has
long been questioned whether Paine was a member of the Masons. There
is no definitive proof either way. There is no specific date known
on which he joined nor a specific lodge to which he was attached."[2]
Nonetheless, Masonic membership has frequently been ascribed to
Paine. This is seen, for example, in the tendency of some American
Grand Lodges, during the 1990's, to publish informational brochures
that placed Paine on the roster of famous Masons. "The Real
Secret of Freemasonry," one such brochure put out by the Grand
Lodge of Oregon, states: "The pantheon of Masons holds
George Washington, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine, among others."[3]
Various Masonic websites continue to make similar claims about Paine
and Masonry.
Paine biographer Bernard Vincent devotes a chapter of The
Transatlantic Republican: Thomas Paine and the Age of Revolutions
to "Thomas Paine, the Masonic Order, and the American
Revolution,"[4] and offers several reasons for the inclination
to consider him a Mason:
While working on my Tom Paine biography, I was
intrigued from the outset by the fact that all of a sudden, within
just a few weeks or months, and as if by magic, Paine leaped from
his obscure humdrum existence in England - where he had worked as
a corset-maker and Excise officer - onto the American literary and
political stage, there to become, at the age of almost forty, one
of the leading lights of the Revolutionary movement.
How was it that a man who was little short of a failure in his
native country became acquainted so rapidly with the most
prominent figures in the Colonies, even becoming a friend of
theirs in many cases? How can one account for the quickness of his
ascent and the suddenness of his glory?
One way of accounting for this, one hypothesis (which has several
times been made), is to consider that Paine became a Freemason and
that, as such, he enjoyed, first in America, then in England and
France, the kindly assistance of certain lodges or of certain
individual Masons.[5]
Vincent himself rejects this hypothesis, however, due to a lack of
corroborative evidence. While it is certain that Washington and
Franklin, for example, were Masons, there is no equivalent support
for such a claim about Paine. (Franklin, who provided Paine with a
letter of introduction before the latter departed England for the
American colonies, will be discussed in greater detail below.)
Assertions of Paine's Masonic membership also rest on the fact that
between 1803 and 1805, after returning to America from England and
France, he penned the essay "Origin of Free-Masonry."[6]
For some, Paine's curiosity about Freemasonry and his decision to
write about it have been, in and of themselves, sufficient proof
that he was a Mason. However, Vincent rejects this line of reasoning
as well:
Paine's interest in Freemasonry was such that toward
the end his life, in 1805, he wrote a lengthy piece entitled An
Essay on the Origin of Freemasonry… But this does not
prove, any more than any other detail or fact that we know of,
that Paine was a Mason. There is indeed no formal trace of his
initiation or membership in England, none in America, and none in
France. Questioned about Paine's membership…the United Grand
Lodge of England had only this to answer: "In the absence of
any record of his initiation, it must, therefore, be assumed he
was not a member of the order."[7]
Apart from the question of his own membership in the fraternity,
Paine certainly had several close friends who were members of the
Order, such as Nicolas de Bonneville. Paine biographer Samuel
Edwards depicts Bonneville as an active Freemason who "was
convinced that the principles and aims of Masonry, if applied to the
world's ailments, would bring peace and prosperity to all nations."[8]
While living in France, Paine resided at the home of Bonneville and
his family, and Fruchtman suggests that during this time Bonneville
introduced Paine to the philosophies of Freemasonry and
Theophilanthropism.[9] The bond between the two men was quite
strong, and Bonneville's wife - Marguerite - and three sons
eventually followed Paine to America.[10]
William M. Van der Weyde, in The Life and Works of Thomas Paine,
also mentions Paine's Masonic associates, while at the same time
emphasizing that they are not evidence he belonged to the
fraternity: "Paine was the author of an interesting and highly
instructive treatise on the Origin of Freemasonry…but,
although many of his circle of friends were undoubtedly members of
that order, no conclusive proof has ever been adduced that Paine was
a Mason."[11] Likewise, Moncure Daniel Conway proposes that "Paine's
intimacy in Paris with Nicolas de Bonneville and Charles Francoise
Dupuis, whose writings are replete with masonic speculations,
sufficiently explains his interest in the subject" of
Freemasonry, even though he himself was not a Mason.[12]
Nicolas de Bonneville's widow, Marguerite, published Paine's "Origin
of Free-Masonry" in 1810, after his death, although she chose
to omit certain passages in it that were critical of Christianity.
(Despite his use of the Bible to support his arguments in such works
as Common Sense and The Crisis, Paine was strongly
opposed to Christianity, and indeed to organized religion in
general, and sought to debunk the Bible in his later writings,
including The Age of Reason.) Most of these were restored in
a later printing, in 1818.[13]
Paine's central premise in "Origin of Free-Masonry" is
that the Order "is derived and is the remains of the religion
of the ancient Druids; who, like the Magi of Persia and the Priests
of Heliopolis in Egypt, were Priests of the Sun."[14] The idea
that Masonry derived from the Druids did not begin with Paine and
has been advanced by others after him. According to Paine, however,
this Druid origin is the true and deepest secret of Masonry, from
which extend all the ceremonies and concealments Masons engage in:
The natural source of secrecy is fear. When any new
religion over-runs a former religion, the professors of the new
become the persecutors of the old… [W]hen the Christian
religion over-ran the religion of the Druids…the Druids
became the subject of persecution. This would naturally and
necessarily oblige such of them as remained attached to their
original religion to meet in secret, and under the strongest
injunctions of secrecy. Their safety depended upon it. A false
brother might expose the lives of many of them to destruction; and
from the remains of the religion of the Druids, thus preserved,
arose the institution which, to avoid the name of Druid, took that
of Mason, and practiced under this new name the rites and
ceremonies of Druids. [15]
Masonic author Albert G. Mackey quips in his History of
Freemasonry that Paine "knew, by the way, as little of
Masonry as he did of the religion of the Druids."[16] He calls
the essay "frivolous" and Paine "a mere sciolist in
the subject of what he presumptuously sought to treat."[17] He
is only slightly more charitable toward Paine in An Encyclopedia
of Freemasonry and its Kindred Sciences, allowing that "For
one so little acquainted with his subject, he has treated it with
considerable ingenuity."[18] Echoing this verdict, Masonic
historian Joseph Fort Newton writes: "The notion that [Paine]
was a Mason is probably due to the fact that he wrote an essay on
Freemasonry, but the essay, while ingenious in its argument, betrays
a vast incomprehension of the Order."[19]
Indeed, it is evident from "Origin of Free-Masonry" that
Paine was not very knowledgeable of the Craft - although this fact
alone does not, of course, prove he was not a Mason when he wrote
it. Paine's general tone, however, shows him to be an outsider
trying to assess what is in the Order, rather than a member of it,
and that, more than anything else, indicates that he was not a Mason
at the time he composed "Origin of Free-Masonry." For
example, after referring to certain statements about Masonry made by
the Provincial Grand Master of Kent, Captain George Smith, in the
latter's The Use and Abuse of Free-Masonry (1783), Paine
declares:
It sometimes happens, as well in writing as in
conversation, that a person lets slip an expression that serves to
unravel what he intends to conceal, and this is the case with
Smith, for in the same chapter he says, "The Druids, when
they committed any thing to writing, used the Greek alphabet, and
I am bold to assert that the most perfect remains of the Druids'
rites and ceremonies are preserved in the customs and ceremonies
of the Masons that are to be found existing among mankind." "My
brethren" says he, "may be able to trace them with
greater exactness than I am at liberty to explain to the public."
This is a confession from a Master Mason, without intending it to
be so understood by the public, that Masonry is the remains of the
religion of the Druids…[20]
These are not the words of a man who is himself a Master Mason, but
rather of one who is guessing at what secrets a Master Mason knows
and may be inadvertently revealing. Paine, an outsider, mistakes
Smith's personal conjectures for an unintended confession.
If he was not a Master Mason at the time he wrote the essay, could
Paine have been an Entered Apprentice or a Fellow-Craft? It is
difficult to argue that Paine was curious enough about Freemasonry's
origin and philosophy to write seriously about the fraternity, and
also to begin the Craft degrees, but that he did not wait until he
had concluded them before finishing his essay. This is an especially
difficult argument to make since in "Origin of Free-Masonry"
Paine contends that Master Masons are privy to information about the
fraternity's origins of which other Masons are ignorant. His essay
opens with this explanation:
The Society of Masons are distinguished into three
classes or degrees. 1st. The Entered Apprentice. 2d. The Fellow
Craft. 3d. The Master Mason.
The Entered Apprentice knows but little more of Masonry than the
use of signs and tokens, and certain steps and words by which
Masons can recognize each other without being discovered by a
person who is not a Mason. The Fellow Craft is not much better
instructed in Masonry, than the Entered Apprentice. It is only in
the Master Mason's Lodge, that whatever knowledge remains of the
origin of Masonry is preserved and concealed.[21]
Presumably, had he begun the degrees, Paine would have wanted all
the knowledge they had to offer, and would have waited until he had
gained access to it before completing his essay. It is far more
likely that he was not at all a member of the fraternity at the time
of the essay's composition and was writing as an outsider, although
one with close associates within the Order.
Although it is unlikely he was a member of the Order, facets of
Paine's thought can still be seen to correspond to Masonic
principles. In The Age of Reason (of which "Origin of
Free-Masonry" may have originally been intended to be a
part),[22] for example, Paine explains his religious beliefs:
I believe in one God, and no more; and I hope for
happiness beyond this life.
I believe the equality of man, and I believe that religious
duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavoring to
make our fellow-creatures happy.[23]
Such statements, which can be said to have a Masonic ring to them,
prompted Joseph Fort Newton to write of Paine:
Thomas Paine…though not a Mason, has left us an
essay on The Origin of Freemasonry. Few men have ever been
more unjustly and cruelly maligned than this great patriot, who
was the first to utter the name "United States," and
who, instead of being a sceptic, believed in "the religion in
which all men agree" - that is, in God, Duty, and the
immortality of the Soul.[24]
Similarly, Vincent concludes in The Transatlantic Republican
that while Paine "probably never belonged to any specific
fraternity, he nevertheless actively sympathized with the Masonic
movement and the philosophy it espoused. Masonic thought had much in
common with his own deistic outlook and his own cult of reason…"[25]
Paine's Deistic-sounding creed in The Age of Reason (and
this creed as Masonically paraphrased by Joseph Fort Newton) is
quite similar to one articulated by Benjamin Franklin - a
self-described Deist as well as a prominent Mason - in his Autobiography:
"That there is one God who made all things. That he governs the
World by his Providence. That he ought to be worshipped by
Adoration, Prayer & Thanksgiving. But that the most acceptable
Service of God is doing Good to Man. That the Soul is immortal."[26]
Although, as Robert P. Falk notes in "Thomas Paine: Deist or
Quaker?," Paine "nowhere states outright, as Franklin
does, that he was a 'thorough Deist,' Paine speaks of the religion
always in terms of intimate sympathy,"[27] and "it seems
safe to conclude that 'the creed of Paine' was…'the purest
deism.'"[28]
Unlike Franklin, however, who was careful not to disparage other
religions, focusing instead on what he held to be the beliefs common
to them all,[29] Paine was not aiming for a generic religious creed.
He lacked what Vincent terms "the discreet Deism of leaders
like Franklin or Jefferson," and was vocal in his opposition to
organized religion.[30] Paine followed his above-quoted creed with
an attack:
I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish
church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish
church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know
of. My own mind is my own church.
All national institutions of churches…appear to me no other
than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and
monopolise power and profit.[31]
This confrontational religious approach is evident in "Origin
of Free-Masonry," as well, where Paine writes that "the
christian religion is a parody on the worship of the Sun, in which
they put a man whom they call Christ, in the place of the Sun, and
pay him the same adoration which was originally paid to the Sun…"[32]
Further on, he depicts Druidism as a "wise, elegant,
philosophical religion…the faith opposite to the faith of the
gloomy Christian church."[33] Such sentiments, which had
aroused so much anger while Paine lived, were what Madame Bonneville
sought to remove from "Origin of Free-Masonry" when she
published it after his death.
Although Voltaire, for example, became a Mason shortly before
passing away, there is nothing to suggest that Paine became a Mason
in the interval between composing "Origin of Free-Masonry"
and his death a few years later, in 1809. As he was certainly not a
Master Mason when he wrote the essay - and as there is no evidence
he joined the fraternity after then - one can conclude, as have
Mackey, Newton, and others, that Paine was not a Freemason. Still,
though the "pantheon of Masons" may not hold Thomas Paine,
this influential and controversial man remains connected to
Freemasonry, if only due to the close friendships he had with some
in the fraternity, and to his having written an intriguing essay on
its origins. |
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