Saturday, October 23, 2004
WAS THE POPE INFLUENCED BY MASONIC PHILOSOPHY ?
A reader sent me the pdf file "The Place of Kabbalah in the Doctrine of Russian Freemasons" by Konstantin Burmistrov and Maria Endel, which appeared in Aries Vol. 4, no. 1. Accessing the article requires registration which I have not done and so can't link the pdf file, but anyone interested in reading the article can obtain a copy for free.
Burmistrov is associated with the Centre for Oriental Philosophies Studies of the Institute of Philosophy, Moscow.
Endel is working on her doctoral dissertation which is devoted to Kabbalah and its impact on Russian Freemasons.
The paper is heavily footnoted and includes more than 130 titles in the Bibliography. I take this to be reliable.
This is the conclusion drawn from their investigation:
It is obvious that the interest of Russian masons in Jewish mysticism was far from superficial, as might seem to be the case at first glance. They looked on Kabbalah as a tradition that preserved invaluable gains of ancient wisdom, true knowledge which had been granted to mankind through revelation. In addition, Kabbalah, pari passu with Magic and Alchemy, was an integral part of the masonic doctrine. It elucidated the structure of divine and terrestrial worlds and the relationship between them, and assisted in revealing the hidden sense of the Scriptures. Moreover, masonic enthusiasm for Kabbalah was aimed at rather practical purposes. Kabbalistic concepts of the universal man (Adam Kadmon) and global improvement (tikkun ha-olam) served as an ideological basis for the masonic program of radical reformation of social, political, moral and religious conditions in Russia.
It is known that the masonic teaching, in general, and its kabbalistic elements, in particular, played a significant role in Russian literature, and not only in the writings of "masonic" authors like M. Kheraskov and S. Bobrov but also in the work of V. Odoyevski, N. Gogol, A Stepanov, D. Begichev, etc.
Even more important was the influence of masonic ideology on the Russian public conscience. Thus, social and politic concepts of mystical masonry became an ideological basis for 18th century Russian conservatism. In the early 19th century when rationalist masonry was expanded anew, the Rosicrucians typified the conservative ideals. Their religious and political views exerted a great influence on the development of Russian Romantic philosophy and social utopianism in the first half of the 19th century as well as of the Slavophile movement. Obviously enough, these ideas remained very important in Russian religious philosophy of the late 19th - early 20th century (V. Soloviev, S. Bulgakov, P. Florenski, N. Berdyaev). Thus, as a component of masonic outlook, Kabbalah has become an important factor in Russian history and culture. (emphasis mine)
To put it succinctly, Russian philosophers were influenced by Masonic philosophy.
Now consider this passage from George Weigel's biography of John Paul II, Witness to Hope:
As Pope, Karol Wojtyla nurtured his interest in Russia and the Russians through numerous channels. He read deeply in the writings of Vladimir Soloviev, the late nineteenth-century Russian philosopher and theologian, a prophet of the reconciliation of Eastern and Western Christianity with a marked millennial strain in his thought. John Paul also became familiar with the work of Russian religious thinkers, once convinced Marxists, who had abandoned Marxism between the 1905 and 1917 revolutions while warning both the government and the Russian Orthodox Church about the impending catastrophe: Nicolai Berdyaev, Sergei Bulgakov, and Simon Frank. These thinkers, and the work of theologians like Pavel Florensky and Georges Florovsky, whom he read in French or Polish translations, familiarized the Pope with the religious core of Russian culture and convinced him that Russia had much to give the world. (p. 568-569 - emphasis mine)
To sum it up, Russian philosophers and theologians influenced by Freemasonry subsequently influenced John Paul II.
