13. Search for that which was lost. "Where is it:" When in the Third Degree the Candidate goes in search of something which was lost his quest is turned into an allegory. That allegory is a dramatization of the question mark. The asking of questions is not a science because questions can be asked about anything and everything; but it is an art, or almost is an art, because it requires much intelligence and skill to know what kind of things questions are, and to understand how to ask them, and to know what kind of thing an answer is.
One of the supreme achievements of the Nineteenth Century was a discovery made about question-asking by the French thinkers who founded mathematical logic. They discovered the fact, and demonstrated it by mathematical methods, that any question which cannot be answered is never a true question, but necessarily a false question. By a false question they meant any proposition in the form of a query which upon being analyzed is found to contain a self-contradiction or else is meaningless; it may appear to be intelligent to a careless mind, it may appear to have meaning and to be a genuine inquiry, but it never is, and is only a string of meaningless words. This tricky and secret deceptiveness of the question which cannot be answered is almost always behind the scenes being hidden away inside it, and oftentimes the discovery of the trick comes explosively and the discovery usually causes us to laugh - this fact is the key to the humor in Alice in Wonderland, in which everybody keeps asking questions, and half the time they are false questions, and when their falseness is shown up the reader laughs. Why did Humpty Dumpty have to sit on the wall? Humpty Dumpty gave Alice a number of answers, and he hoped they sounded very profound, and Alice herself believed for a time in the mysterious fate which kept him on the wall. But the trick in it was Alice's assumption that he had to sit on the wall, whereas, as his fall demonstrated, he did not have to. Because her question presupposed something to be a fact which was not a fact her's was a false question. Such a question cannot be answered because it itself makes an answer impossible.
A true question never poses an insoluble mystery, or conceals a trick or hides a self-contradiction, and no sane man would try to ask an unanswerable question. If you ask me a question it is a request for information which I possess and which you desire to have. You never ask a question because you do not expect to receive an answer; you always ask one because you do expect to receive an answer. If I ask you what day of the week it is, or what time of the day it is, or where Jones Street is, or what church you belong to, or if you believe in the United Nations it is because I believe you to possess that information and I expect you to give it to me. It may be that A cannot answer some given question B asks him, but that does not prove that the question is unanswerable; B will ask it of C; and if C should prove to B that his question is meaningless, or contains a selfcontradiction, it does not mean that B has an unanswerable question, but means that he has no question at all. Thus, if I ask you how to square a circle I have not asked you a question because the words "square a circle" have no meaning. If instead of asking a question in the form of words a man asks it in the form of action the same truths apply. No sane man ever searches for something lost if beforehand he is convinced that it cannot be found. A Candidate would not go in search of a Word if no Word existed; and if any man were to retort upon this that the word was too mystical or mysterious to be found the reply would be that if there is any such thing it is not a word.
The Allegory occurs within the Third Degree; it is enacted in the Lodge; it occurs because of what went before it in the Ritual and it leads to something which follows it, therefore the Allegory is exclusively Masonic, and must be interpreted in Masonic terms. Other allegories of a similar kind are used elsewhere, but this particular allegory occurs nowhere but in a Lodge, is enacted by a Candidate, and its meanings are Masonic meanings.
There was once a Master of Masons. He was supervising work on the most famous building of the world, and while other craftsmen had this or that portion of the plan in their minds the Master alone had the whole plan. This Master is lost, and the key to the whole plan is lost with him; the result is that the work comes to a stop. King Solomon comes to maintain order among the stricken craftsmen, but he does not have the plan. At this point the Ritual poses a question to the Candidate, which may be stated in words of our own: "The Master is lost. What can we do? What can you do? Can you find him?" The Candidate's answer is to search for that which was lost. Did he find it? Yes, he discovered that he himself was the answer. For it is an Ancient Landmark of the Craft that no Apprentice is ever admitted into membership until he has mastered the whole of the art of Freemasonry, and that includes the ability to occupy any Masonic office. If a veteran Craftsman drops out from old age, or a Master of Masons dies or otherwise passes on out of his office, a substitute is always at hand - "substitute" not meaning a makeshift but a replacement. What the Candidate discovers is that he is in search of his own mastership; once he becomes Master of the art he is able to take any Brother's place as Master of Masons, wherefore it was said that he was that which he found, he was the answer to his own question.
14. Solomon's Temple. The Ritual is full of surprises-surprise is one of the secrets of great ritualism. It almost never does what we expect it to do, or says what we expect it to say. A member on the side-lines may grow drowsy in the middle of a Degree if he has seen it a hundred times, but no Candidate ever does; he never knows what is coming next. Solomon's Temple is a curiously interesting example of this element of surprise. It surprises us because we do not find it where we expected to find it. Considering that it is the largest and most imposing symbolism in Freemasonry, and that so many things in the Degrees refer to it or are described in terms of it, we naturally expect it to stand at the climax of the Third Degree; but it does not, for the climax is in what happens to a man, not what happens to a building. It is in the Second Degree, not in the Third, that the Temple stands in the center of the action; indeed most of the action of the Second Degree occurs inside the Temple - in the Third Degree it is merely a part of the background.
There is an historical reason for this. Until about 1740 A. D. Lodges conferred only two Degrees, and the Making of a Mason was therefore completed in the Second, which had two names; in respect of its making a Candidate a full member of the Fraternity, a Fellow, it was the Fellowcraft Degree; in respect of its being the making of a Master, a master of the art, it was the Master Mason Degree. The new Degree (it was new as an organized Rite, not in its content) should have been called the Master of Masons Degree; calling it the Master Mason Degree has been confusing ever since. And it has been confusing because the adding of a Third Degree could not make over or revolutionize the old Two Degrees; therefore we still have the sanctum sanctorum in the Second. This Sanctum which was the inmost recess of the Temple, means that a Candidate has mastered his goal, he has served his apprenticeship, he has learned his Arts and Sciences, he cannot go farther in the art because there is nowhere to go. The building which encloses this Degree is an already-completed one, to represent the fact that he who was an Apprentice has now mastered his art, he has completed the work of learning.
Another curious fact about Solomon's Temple is that its being Solomon's Temple has nothing to do with it. It could be Charlemagnes, or Athelstan's, or any other building; in the Old Charges it is not any building in particular, but is any building; also, and for like reason, it need not be a temple, though there are ritualistic advantages in having it one. As it stands described in the Second Degree it is evident that it is not the historical Solomon's Temple which is used, but the ritualist's temple. If it were intended to represent the actual, historical Solomon's Temple the Second Degree would be mistaken at almost every point: in the actual Temple the stairs were on the outside not on the inside, nobody went into the Temple, still less into the Holy of Holies, there were no Greek Columns in it, no Three, Five, and Seven Steps, and no Rabbi ever delivered in it an Eighteenth Century lecture on the arts, the sciences, and the orders of architecture. The Ritualist is not an historian; he can play fast and loose with history, like the author of the Arabian Nights; dates and places mean nothing to him; if he needs to have Euclid carry on a conversation with Solomon he can do so; he is bound only by the rules of his art, not by the canons of history, and history is in his hands only so much raw material.
Solomon's Temple represents nothing occult, or mystical, or mysterious. It is nothing more than a building, any building, any constructed piece of architecture, and it is for that reason that it is of such paramount importance in our Ritual, and is so charged with meaning not only for Masonic symbologists but also for Masonic historians - especially the latter, because if a Masonic historian loses for a moment his hold on that which Solomon's Temple represents, Masonic history will fall apart in his hands into a meaningless jumble. There are sound and obvious reasons for this; and they are not farfetched; and they are equally true for any man, whether a Mason or not, because the reasons have a universal validity.
Each and every art, calling, trade, profession, craft, or vocation has in itself a changeless pattern, a fixed center, by which it is regulated, and shaped and controlled. Thus, at the center of the carpenter's world is the timber, the square, the saw; at the center of the musician's world are notes and instruments; at the center of the physician's world are symptoms, diagnosis, and remedies; and so on forth; any man in any art can go as far as he pleases and be as free as he desires but he is harnessed to that which stands at the center, and everything he does has reference to that center, and therefore his art has its own changeless and characteristic pattern. In Freemasonry that controlling and regulating pattern has always been a building. Through the centuries Freemasons have formed many sorts of associations - gilds, fraternities, City Companies; they have adopted a wide variety of rules and regulations; they have had many landmarks; they have used hundreds of symbols; they work in this age in more than forty Degrees; they have their Lodges over the earth; but everything they have been or have done has always, directly or indirectly, been made necessary by building, or has referred back to building, or belonged to the building art. Its pattern always has been the pattern of architecture. Even its nomenclature is an architectural one. Its philosophy of work, which has universal validity, and is its own great contribution to the world, it sets forth in the forms and terms of the builder's art. If this be a true account of it, then, and with no farfetched arguments, that which is meant by the symbolism of Solomon's Temple becomes a sovereign touch-stone by which any Mason can detect the true and the false in interpretations of Freemasonry; if the interpretations are consistent with the pattern set by the art of architecture they are true; if they contradict that pattern they certainly are mistaken.
15. Clasped Hands. In a chapter elsewhere on the Monitor it is stated that the Monitor (or Exoteric Work) is not time immemorial, or an Ancient Landmark, but was produced by a group of English Masons, under the leadership of William Preston, in the middle of the Eighteenth Century, that Preston was mistaken in his interpretation of the Ritual at a number of points, and it was argued that Grand Lodges ought to prepare a new Monitor. The present instance is a case in point. In a clause in the Monitorial portion of the First Degree as used in many Grand Jurisdictions it is stated that "our Ancient Brethren worshipped deity under the names of Fides, or Fidelity, which was sometimes represented by two right hands joined..." The statement is a catalog of blunders. Our Ancient Brethren did not worship deity under any name except God. Pagans here and there worshipped Fides one or two thousand years before our Fraternity began but even they did not worship Fides as deity, but only as one of many small gods - no Freemason was ever a pagan. Operative Freemasons did not use Fides even as a symbol, and it is doubtful if one in five thousand of them had ever so much as heard of Fides - what had Medieval architects to do with Ancient mythology? And who among the three to four million Masons in the United States has ever heard of the old Roman god, or feels any need for a symbol of him? The Clasped Hands are exactly what they appear to be, two Freemasons grasping each other's hands.
Any man who has read through the body of English literature, including American, from Chaucer, its founder, until the present, knows that an abrupt and revolutionary change came over it at about 1850 A. D. It had been masculine as well as manly, even in its love lyrics, candid, sincere, forthright, bold, free, creative; then, within a decade, it became effeminate, timid, emasculated, and put on ruffles and laces, and every poem had to be "sweet," and every story had to have a happy ending; women became females, and the females practiced the arts of swooning and fainting. This came about because Queen Victoria would have it so, and what she would have her court also had to have, and the court set the fashion for the nation, and since in that period American literature aped the literature of England, we had as much Victorianism here as there. What began as a softening of the "heart" (the Queen's favorite word) ended as a softening of the brain. Even Matthew Arnold, who was pessimistic and ironic, and could be sarcastic on occasion, gave an anthology the egregious title of A Garland of Friendship. An American, whom the author of these sentences could describe from acquaintanceship, got out a similar work which was a national best-seller for two or three years under the ineffable title of Heart Throbs! Friendship, which in practice is often unyielding and implacable; this Victorianism degraded into a "sentiment"; and from sentiment was only a step to sentimentalism; and Freemasonry suffered much from this effeminacy inwardly because if friendship is a sentimentalism so is brotherhood and fraternalism, and this softening up and rotting out of that which is most essential in the Craft did grave hurt to an association of men which is wholly masculine and has always rested on the heroic virtues.
It is certain that the Operative Masons would have had no patience with this notion that friendship, brotherhood, and fraternalism were sentiments, or, still worse, sentimentalities. They were grim-faced, thin-lipped, case-hardened men. Their feeling of friendship was never one for the soft, the effeminate, the thin-skinned, the dreamers, for whom they had no feeling except contempt, but was nearer to the feeling of comradeship soldiers have for each other in battle. It had its roots not in the things that are soft but in the things that are hard. They were hard men because they did hard work, and their friendship was less a feeling than it was a sealing of faith in each other to stand together when things were hard and dangerous; there was an element of the implacable in it, and almost of ruthlessness.
When a veteran Mason grasped the hand of a Newly-Made Mason the two men faced each other, looked each other in the eye, measured each other, and if the veteran could have put into words what he put into his grip they would have been unfit for a Victorian Garland of Friendship - the image invoked would have been not a garland but a chain of steel; and the words would have run somewhat as follows:
"In this work we work together or we
cannot work. If you fall down on your own work, you will render
useless what I have worked on for a week or a month. If you miscalculate
the stones in the arch the arch will fall and the roof may fall
with it, and if it does I as well as you may be under it. If you
scamp your work on a wall the wall may fall, if it does it may
fall on your fellows as well as yourself. The work we are doing
here puts bread into the mouth of every craftsman, his wife, and
his children, if you snarl it up, and bring it to a stop how can
they eat? I have watched you as an apprentice and I now size you
up as a man, with these things in mind; I am satisfied with you.
I do not believe you will fail, or fall down, or back down. I
accept you as a man upon whom I can rely as upon myself, and I
give you my hand on it."
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