The Necessity of Grammar, Rhetoric and Logic

No Masonic lodge would allow an Entered Apprentice to become a Master Mason without passing to the degree of Fellowcraft first. It would be unimaginable to proceed otherwise. One of the Working Tools of an Entered Apprentice is the Common Gavel, which we use to divest our hearts and consciences of the vices and superfluities of life; thereby fitting our minds, as living stones, for that spiritual building, that house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. There is a suitable proficiency in the use of this tool which is required of us before we can be passed, and our conductor vouches for us that we have that suitable proficiency.

In the Fellowcraft degree, we are taught about the seven liberal arts and sciences, that we should engage with in constant study. There is a certain peril in making the transition from Operative Masonry to Speculative Masonry. Stones can be tried objectively by the square, but men cannot always be so tried, even though the candidate lecture of the Fellowcraft invites us to do so. In making the transition from Operative to Speculative Masonry, we still try each living stone, only with the Working Tools of a Fellowcraft in their speculative usages, rather than their operative usages. No mason should be offended at being tried, as he has been ever tried, never denied, and ready to be tried again.

An Operative Freemason works in stone. A Speculative Freemason works on himself. At the Entered Apprentice level, he works on the guttural, pectoral, manual, and pedal levels. At the Fellowcraft level, he works on the verbal and intellectual levels. At the Master Mason level, he works on the spiritual level. If he fails to work on the guttural, pectoral, manual and pedal levels, he cannot be a fit subject for the lessons of the Fellowcraft. Similarly, if he fails to work on the verbal and intellectual levels, he cannot be a fit subject for the lessons of the Master Mason. This science is progressive, and indeed must be so.

The seven liberal arts and sciences are divided into the Trivium and the Quadrivium. The Trivium is a prerequisite for the Quadrivium. A man who fails to master the Trivium cannot be a Fellowcraft, let alone a Master Mason.

Grammar is the study of the structure of language, and the way that language conveys meaning. Without a serious study of grammar, we cannot assume that we are capable of conveying meaning through language. Language is complicated, ambiguous, frustrating, challenging. That is why it takes a lifetime of study. Language is a powerful tool, and as Masons, we insist that our brethren master the use of their tools. Words have meaning, whether we want them to or not. Syntax conveys meaning, whether we want it to or not. Human beings have the option of vomiting out strings of words (or things they wish were words) artlessly without any care as to how they are received and understood. But Masons do not have that option, not if they want to remain fellows of the Craft.

That leads to rhetoric, or the art of fashioning language to convey meaning, of moving the hearts and minds of those who receive our language, and ultimately, persuading them that we have something valid to convey. Men, and especially Masons, have strong opinions because we are intelligent men brought in close proximity with other intelligent men of very diverse backgrounds, faiths, political opinions, and educations. It is natural that, as much as we use the trowel to best agree, we sometimes will not agree. Rhetoric teaches us how to make our cases as Masons, and not as bullies nor as petulant children.

Rhetoric is neutral. It can be used for good, or it can be used for evil, as any propagandist knows. But Masons are committed to truth, and logic is the study of how to test our ideas for their truth value. Rhetorical logic (I would consider mathematical logic to be a different subject, better covered under arithmetic in the scheme of the seven liberal arts and sciences) is the study of how to fail to convey the truth verbally, by studying logical fallacies. Because a Mason values the truth above all else, when confronted with a fallacy, he divests his heart and conscience of it, as the dross he needs to leave behind in order to be a living stone fit for the Master's use.

A Mason who eschews these lessons is as contemptible as one who eschews our other virtues, make no mistake. A bus driver who does not know whether or not he cannot safely operate his bus but drives it anyway is a menace. A Mason who does not know whether or not his words have meaning cannot be responsible for his words, and words have launched wars, shaped nations, saved or damned souls, and have erected new sciences. A Mason who cannot sway the hearts and minds of others through his words will forever be thought a fool, and we should not be at the making of a Mason of a fool. A Mason who does not know whether or not his ideas are true, and declines to test them for their truth value, and yet persists in those ideas is a man who cannot value truth. This puts him in spiritual peril, and demonstrates that he eschews our other virtues—virtues more immediately obviously moral in nature.

To try a Fellowcraft is not to insult him but to honor him. You will not be the first, nor the last, to do so. If he is also a Master Mason, then his brethren have vouched for his proficiency. It makes liars of us all if he claims honors in the Craft that he has not yet earned.

I am adamant about this. A Mason who makes simple grammatical errors shows his contempt towards Freemasonry by doing so. A Mason who does not rise above cliché and uttered banalities he repeats from others shows his contempt towards Freemasonry by doing so. A mason who persists in ideas and sentiments that are logically false shows his contempt towards Freemasonry for doing so. We are all rough ashlars striving to perfect ourselves. But a Mason who does not strive to perfect himself stops being a Mason, and this includes every part of the Masonic curriculum, including the seven liberal arts and sciences. Not every Mason has studied atonal counterpoint or gravitational redshift, even though we strive to learn music and astronomy. But a Mason who defends his ignorance shows his contempt for Masonry by doing so.

We can try a Fellowcraft by his attitude towards what he does not yet know. The necessity of a virtuous education is stressed throughout our ritual. This education did not end when we left our respective schools; it continues as long as we remain conscious.

Some of us were educated men before we ever became Masons. Some of us never received a basic education and are called upon to learn now what we never learned before. Masons meet on the level; but not because we insist on a baseline mediocrity in our members. We meet on the level because we each strive to be worthy of our brothers, with zeal and humility. William Preston was an orphan who taught himself, and yet he became the framer of our Craft Degrees. Benjamin Franklin came from similarly humble circumstances. Freemasonry demands daily improvement, no matter what our starting points are, and the results of daily improvement are notable, whereas the results of inertia discredit our Craft.

Each of us is a walking advertisement for the Craft. A Masonic communication riddled with spelling and grammatical errors embarrasses the Fraternity as a whole, not merely because it reveals us as ignorant men; but because it reveals us as men who profess to value the very arts we demonstrate that we do not value.

Masonic Trivia

The Ahiman Rezon instructs new Fellowcrafts:

Grammar is the science which teaches us to express our ideas in appropriate words, which we may afterward beautify and adorn by means of Rhetoric; while Logic instructs us how to think and reason with propriety, and to make language subordinate to thought.

These three arts are collectively known as the Trivium, the initiatory phase of a Classical education, to be followed by the Quadrivium: Arithmetic, Geometry, Music and Astronomy. As the latter four are more technical than the former three, and taught with these as their prerequisites, the Trivium was considered to be more basic than the Quadrivium, and is where we get the modern word trivial from.

It was assumed that an unlearned person would begin by mastering these three arts, Logic, Grammar, and Rhetoric, and from this basis would be able to handle more specific concepts explored in more detail in the Quadrivium. Thus the ability to think rationally, to order these thoughts coherently, and to express them persuasively were abilities that an educated person had mastered.

That brilliant educator, Sister Miriam Joseph, wrote a book about the Trivium and what it means to education. She wrote:

Logic is the art of thinking; grammar, the art of inventing symbols and combining them to express thought; and rhetoric, the art of communicating thought from one mind to another, the adaptation of language to circumstance.

This quote is worth exploring in more detail. Humans think. Animals probably are able to cobble a few impulses together into something more profound. My dog hears my footsteps in the stairwell, and can distinguish mine from my roommates and neighbors, and has an emotional response: his tail begins wagging vigorously with enthusiasm. He likes to sleep by the front door, and my footsteps alert him so that, without getting up, he wags his tail, slamming it into the floor with a resounding thump that I can hear as I ascend the stairs. When I take his leash off of the hook on the wall, he dances with enthusiasm, because he can deduce that we are about to go for a walk. Is this a thought he is entertaining? I'm not really sure.

But humans think, and most of it do it without any explicit training. Why, then, is there an art to thinking? Because we can think things that are false. And those false thoughts can get us into trouble. Without training, we can make leaps of thought that are unsound. In the study of logic, we learn about fallacies, common errors in deduction that humans are prone to making. There is hubris in learning about logic, because one cannot learn about logic without learning how often one has failed to apply logic. Learning logic requires self-examination, and this threatens the ego. It takes an evolved human to examine errors one has committed, and by implication, their consequences. Therefore it takes humility to learn logic, and logic teaches humility to some degree, but it can also instill arrogance as well. Logical failures are ubiquitous, and the student of logic, in spotting these errors in the field, can conclude that most people are stupid, or worse, duplicitous, and feel superior as a result. People who hold logic above all other arts can become misanthropic and disdainful of those who order their values differently. So the student who learns logic first and will learn other arts learns a two-fold humility: one humility upon learning that one is frequently erroneous, and another from sitting in fellowship with others who are frequently erroneous. Logic is Wisdom.

Grammar is the art of infusing words with meaning. Sister Miriam Joseph tells us that grammar consists of "inventing symbols and combining them to express thought". We may think that inventing symbols is something our ancestors did, a finished task, but that would be short-sighted. Each new learner recreates the world anew. A word becomes ours when we own it as if we had invented it ourselves. Any student may put a string of words together that have never been put together before, and in this, there is invention. But the crucial concept in this phrase is the expression of thought. What we think is trapped in our brains, and others can only infer what thoughts we think. This is the basis of human liberty. Our thoughts are our own, and only ours unless we choose to share them with others. That transfer may be orderly, but it rarely is. Too often we fail to convey what we really think, and each word we utter is recontextualized by our hearers, to the detriment of what we intend to mean. Because thoughts are impulses cobbled together, it could be that we don't really understand our own thoughts until we can trap them into structures that have meaning in them, like rounding up wild mustangs, and taming them one by one.

We can observe that there are different types of words. Some words convey objects, some actions, some relationships between other objects or actions, and some color the actions or objects we mean to describe. By knowing how these different kinds of words fit together, we can ensure that our words convey the meaning we intend for them as suitably as possible. Without a mastery of grammar, we do not know if our utterances actually convey what we intend them to convey, but our confusion is even worse that that: until we concretize our thoughts through writing or deliberate speech, our thoughts have no form, no transferability, no existence outside of our own minds. Grammar is Strength. It takes logic and grammar for us to become effective thinkers.

No matter how polished our thoughts may become through the arts of logic and grammar, they will not be accepted by others until we make an effective study of rhetoric. We have to train how to shape our thoughts into a form that others will receive with meaning intact. It is useless to formulate ideas that cannot be shared, and useless to have thoughts that do not fit into the circumstances one finds oneself in. Circumstances change. The people we find among us will vary. We need to be able to tailor our ideas to each and every new situation we are in, in order for them to be effective. Rhetoric is Beauty.

Mastery of the Trivium is essential for any mason. It is not only an intellectual imperative, but a moral imperative. Masons are distinguished by the self-discipline that our obligations put upon us. A mason should be a man of his word, and it takes study to master thought enough to organize thought, to shape thought into words, and to shape words so that they are appropriate for the occasion. A mason cannot fulfill his obligations without a commitment to a life-long study of the Trivium.

We do not assume that an Entered Apprentice has these skills when he is challenged to learn them upon taking his Fellowcraft degree. But we do assume that a Master Mason has, by virtue of being found worthy to take that degree. The responsibility to ensure that these skills have been mastered is balanced between a Lodge that finds a Fellowcraft worthy to take another degree and that Fellowcraft who stands before his lodge and takes the Oath of a Master Mason for the first time.