THE BUILDER MAY 1927

The Freemason's Vision of God

By BRO. W. W. COVEY-CRUMP, M. A.

WE are very pleased to present an article by a well-known English
writer and student on the subject of the implications of the
Masonic requirement of a belief in God which is being discussed
from different points of view in the pages of The Builder. W. Bro.
Covey-Crump is a clergyman of the Church of England and is also the
present Master of Quatuor Coronati Lodge. His article, however,
will speak for itself; one explanatory comment however, may be made
for the benefit of American readers. In the English ritual the
Supreme Being is referred to by a different title in the different
degrees, and in these titles there is a certain progression of
meaning appropriate to the special character of the grade.
I HAVE been asked to express the general idea which English
Freemasons as such have concerning the nature of the Deity, and of
the relationship which He has graciously permitted the world of
humanity to have towards Himself. Like many (perhaps most) other
brethren who will read these words, I hold certain personal
convictions distinctive of a definitely religious denomination.
With those convictions this article has no concern. But when, in
our lodges, we invoke or refer to the Deity, some communal
conception of Him is assumed as a basic landmark of the Order. Of
every candidate for admission thereto we demand that he believes in
the Great and (I think I may say) the Only Architect of the
Universe. Our question here is "what do we all believe as to His
essential nature?" Can we say that, after having been advanced to
the more perfect knowledge claimed by the Master Masons, we have
assimilated a fundamental notion of the Deity as held in common by
the Craft?

In our degrees He is successively presented to our minds as the
Great Architect, the Grand Geometrician, and the Most High. As
Apprentices we regarded Him as the Great Architect--"Great" when
compared with His physical agents--the sole Source and Sustainer of
all material things which comprise the universe. This is the first
concept; and it involves a conviction that both the universe and
its Architect have a true and real existence quite apart from any
human consciousness of them. This aspect of the Deity may be fairly
expressed as a dominant Personality, eternal and ubiquitous like
the spatial ether which He pervades. Pending a conclusive proof of
Einstein's theory our notion of the ether must be hypothetical; and
it my differ from the reality as much as ordinary notions of color
and density differ from those held by Larmor and Lodge, and similar
scientific savants; nevertheless it will serve our present purpose
as an illustration.

THE GRAND GEOMETRICIAN OF THE UNIVERSE

As Fellowcrafts we were enjoined to contemplate our intellectual
faculties, and the Deity as Grand Geometrician of them--therefore
the Source and Centre of all human consciousness of ourselves and
of our environment. The two great pillars so prominently associated
with that Masonic Degree symbolically correspond to the two primary
mental concepts-- Space and Time--even if they do not actually
represent those concepts. The winding staircase denoting arts and
sciences--the path of our intellectual ascent-- is flanked on its
threshold by those same two conventional notions of magnitude and
duration. Psychologically they are a priori perceptions, axiomatic
phenomena to our intellectual faculties, underlying every
presentment of objectivity possible in our present consciousness.
Possibly they may be illusions (vide Klein in A. Q. C. xi, 155),
merely relative modes by which our senses correlate our
surroundings. Nevertheless we must posit a permanent noumenon
behind them, for otherwise we should have (with the Academics of
old ) to despair of Truth as an enigma without a solution. What we
now apprehend is Truth--though it be Truth "in part"; and what we
look for is that "part" to be (under more perfect conditions)
absorbed in the whole, not to be "done away" as a baseless
hallucination for which the Truth may be substituted. Masonically
speaking, Space and Time may be regarded as paper and ideograms
whereby the Grand Geometrician materializes His design for the
guidance of His workmen. Here again we seem to be brought back to
the spatial ether which (as sir Oliver Lodge has said) "may also
have mental and spiritual functions to subserve in some other order
of existence" [Continuity, p. 60].

But in any case consciousness itself is a reality, and a permanent
reality. Our awareness is persistent though our thoughts are in
fluxion. In individual persons poverty of intelligence is induced
by cerebral derangement or debility, and mental decay ofttimes
accompanies senility; disease or narcotics will suspend its
activity even as sleep periodically interrupts its intensity;
nevertheless mental consciousness is as undiminishably persistent
in humanity as the physical germ-plasm which reproduces the
species. Consequently no idea regarding God can be satisfying
unless it postulates that the Deity is incessantly conscious, that
He is indeed the Source and Centre of all grades of consciousness
however sublime or however rudimentary. In consciousness,
intelligence and wisdom, He must be perfect--His omniscience being
en rapport with all the modes and grades of intelligence with which
He has endowed His various creatures. A universal but irrational
Force, manifesting itself by gravitation, cohesion, electricity and
chemical affinity, is too obviously inferior to human intelligence
for it to constitute an inspiring conception of the Deity. Nor
would the alternative notion--that the Deity is an impersonal
aggregate of all the various orders of consciousness possessed by
individual units--be a whit more satisfying. We can no more suppose
the Deity to be pantheistic than we can suppose our own
personalities to be an aggregation of such consciousness as are
possessed by the physical atoms which constitute our bodies. Thus
our primary concept of the Great Architect merges into that of the
Grand Geometrician --by whose inscrutable wisdom the cosmos was
preconceived ere it began to be materialized and transformed by
agents continuously and systematically acting according to His
will.

GOD, THE MOST HIGH

When raised to the Degree of Master Mason we were led on to regard
the Deity as "the Most High," an expression which I take to mean
God as He Himself is-- independently of every relation to the
universe and of every extraneous idea concerning Him. That He
exceeds the finite apprehension of human beings is by all
acknowledged; but people are rather prone to imagine that the part
of God's essentia which transcends their cognition resembles and is
homogeneous with the part revealed. There is, however, no reason
why such should be the case. The term "Most High," when rightly
understood, implies that in all probability the unknowable aspect
of the Divine Nature is entirely different from any notion which
human mentality is capable of formulating. The invisible side of
the moon is probably much the same in general features as that disk
which is familiar to our astronomers. But we have absolutely no
ground for supposing a like correspondence in the essentia of the
Deity. Indeed all psychology negatives such a supposition. This
distinction, between the Absolute Nature of the Deity and those
aspects of His character which are capable of being made manifest
to human (and conceivably to other superior intelligent) beings,
was well-known to Jewish thinkers in medieval times. In the Old
Testament Scriptures the latter was denoted by the expression "Name
of the Lord," whilst in the Zohar the former is denominated "Ain
Soph"--the eternally secret Majesty of the Deity beyond all that
His creatures in their sublimest range of intelligence can imagine
Him to be.

The same distinction was subsequently brought into Freemasonry;
and, to those who study its profound implicits, is still presented
as the main difference between the Sacred Symbol in the Second
Degree and the Glory of the Lord in the Third. As the Middle
Chamber and the Sanctum Sanctorum are not synonymous terms, so too
the glory of the one is not the glory of the other. The one glory
is thinkable but the other is transcendental.

From a doctrinal point of view the foregoing reflections perhaps do
not carry us far; but I venture to say they accord with the
comprehensiveness of our institution, and they furnish a safe and
substantial site upon which each brother can (and should) erect a
superstructure of religious belief and practice, according to his
own individual conscience and temperament.

