Alexander Gillies and Adam Smith: Freemasonry and the Resonance of Self-Love

Abstract

In 1766 at the Lodge of Kilwinning, Alexander Gillies, a young Scottish minister, delivered a discourse that not only manifested the influence of Adam Smith's moral theory but articulated how Christianity and freemasonry proposed distinct but complementary responses to the problem of self-love. This article, part intellectual history and part biography, examines Gillies's discourse, taking into account details of Gillies's life and establishing that he was in fact a student of Smith's at the University of Glasgow. The article then considers Smith's influence, as evident in Gillies's discourse, and reveals how a Calvinist notion of self-love resonated into the late eighteenth century. In the discourse, Gillies invoked subjects redolent of Smith's moral theory: the force of social interaction, the power of sympathy and the negative influence of self-love (a theme also manifest in some sermons of Smith's colleague, William Leechman). Like Smith, Gillies also worried about partiality and faction. Gillies forwarded the institution of freemasonry as a means—complementary to Christianity—of counteracting the tendency to partiality, born of self-love. In a later satirical composition, published in 1774 in the Edinburgh Magazine and Review, Gillies extended another critique of the power of self-love. Forged in part from his relation to Smith, Gillies's concern with self-love and his fresh stance on freemasonry yield a distinct perspective on eighteenth-century Scottish culture and ideas and offer insight into the complex relations of university, kirk and masonic lodge.