Press cutting - January - February 2010
Franc maçonnerie Magazine

Interview by Jean-François Maury

Alain-Noël Dubart, native from the urban centre of Lille was elected last June as Grand Master of the Grande Loge de France. His Obedience is exclusively masculine and counts about 30 000 members and works only with one Rite, the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite. Alain-Noël Dubart studied classicism and sciences and is surgeon.

Jean-François Maury : Does the fact that you have been initiated change your everyday life ?

AND : The initiation is a process which develops in the time which creates multiple points of view. It seems to me that the Masonic Initiation brings at first to appreciate the quality of the supplied work, and to be more demanding with regard to what we do and we practise.

JFM :  What you mean by demand ?

AND : The requirement to consider the other as another oneself, the requirement of justice, at the end of the Masonic approach require to perform every act in the best way we can achieve.

Also in a general meaning it seems that a long pursued Masonic approach leads to the conclusion that the activity performed is not only an activity that seeks material satisfaction and allows to work and to live in Human society, but much more to involve completely in the Human society. It allows to become a useful and conscious element of this society, and that means engaging himself in different aspects like associations, trade union, which completes the occupation and include it in social life.

Finally, and on the point which is maybe the most important it is to consider that finally, and whatever are our personal religious and philosophic beliefs, every action, every new approach has to join and complete what is sometimes a little bit pompously called, the plan of the Great Architect of the Universe.

JFM : Your personal work would thus have to suit to the Creation?

AND : It does not involve a Divine plan, a revealed plan, which would be given once for all and to which one should submit itself. On the contrary. The matter is to work in the largest liberty conferred by the initiation to realise and to complete the unachieved Work of the creative Principle, as least if we join the Judeo-Christian Tradition in a broad sense. I mean the organisation and the arrangement of the surrounding chaos in order to create there what, for the ancient Greeks of the classic period, was the final purpose of a successful life, namely Order and Harmony.

JFM : The world such as it is seems nevertheless good far from Order and Harmony. Can the freemasonry contribute to improve it ?

AND : We live in a age which developed a growing and enhanced individualism together with a frenzied desire to accumulate material and financial goods. I feel more or less vaguely that the young men of our time want to find other reasons to live and to hope. Not necessarily the reasons to hope in a religious frame but reasons to hope for a good life, in the ancient and Aristotelian meaning of the word.

JFM : At present what would be the reasons to adhere to the Freemasonry ?

AND : It seems to me that one of the essential reasons in our time to adhere to the Freemasonry is on one hand, to find a traditional and rigorous frame within which the largest liberty to think is granted to each member but offering, at the same time, a particularly strict and progressive initiatory Method in its development. The second reason seems to be to develop an independent thought which allows to release itself from the daily routine, aiming only to the consumption of goods, to be able in fine to act in the world and to contribute to that offer us all our Rites to the peaceful and progressive improvement of the Humanity.

JFM : To what does it lead and in which perspective ?

AND : Get loose from the commonplace and from the consumable, to go towards the long-lasting and the Beautiful, get loose from individual contingencies to try to create around one more Order and Harmony. This seems to me, some good reasons to adhere to the Freemasonry in particular to what offers the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite practised by the Grande Loge de France.