206 FROM THE ART OF BUILDING TO THE ART OF THINKING
continue work on the Duomo. Until the Renaissance, architecture —in
fact, culture as a whole—retained a very international character. Free-
masons were part of this, forming a truly catholic, universal group that
traveled ceaselessly from one country to another to employ the secrets
of their craft, their art. This international movement is why it is often
difficult to speak of schools as defined by their geographic location.
It is important to comprehend how this international understand-
ing manifested itself on the spiritual and religious planes as well as on
the operative plane of labor unity, which means we must discover how
this unity was guaranteed among builders and between builders as a
group and the profane and temporal powers of the time.
The Christian Character of FreemasonryTheir religious foundation was the essential glue of all the builders
groups of the Middle Ages. For the monastic brotherhoods, the propa-
gation of the faith was the direct impulse for the construction of con-
vents and churches. The vast brotherhoods that built the Gothic
cathedrals responded to this religious inspiration. It was an era when
"man looked up at the heavens with faith, in search of hope and con-
solation. He entrusted his misery to she who should no doubt under-
stand it best, because she was weak and she was a woman, and she
could best speak to He who could do all, because she was the Mother
of God. He built for the Lord of Lords; he built for Our Lady...^1
It was a time when Christians could be seen "leaving their native
land to devote themselves wholeheartedly to the construction of a
cathedral rising on the banks of a foreign river... and then, after
twenty or thirty years of laboring in complete obscurity, the cross
would shine from atop the sanctuary built by their hands, and they
moved on, without leaving their names, to die in peace, in the blessed
thought that they had made something for God."^2
This enthusiastic faith continued to animate the craft communities
as they began forming. Over the centuries, religion permeated the lives
of men and their work itself could not be separated from its sacred
nature. It was the ascetic path of the Christian life that led to God.
Craft associations could not be solely professional in nature, for if they