Undeniably, during the eighteenth century “several” Masonic bodies in Europe introduced the principles of enlightenment into their rituals, this distorting their esoteric and initiatic origins. In these Obediences the ritual has gradually been deprived of its true symbolic significance and replaced by commentaries and exegeses characterised by a desolating banality and a dull moralism reminiscent of the “century of Enlightenment“. This “progressivist” degeneration of the principles of Freemasonry has consequently led to a misconceived interpretation of the concept of Fellowship, increasingly construed as an independent “individual subject” invested with a real power within the context of sociopolitical confiness, or levelling out into a form of essentially moral and material soliddarism.
Fabio Venzi in Studies In Traditional Freemasonry p. 170