Universal Freemasonry 209dogmas and theories that medieval logic found entrance to with no
difficulty.
This was the era when Raymond Lulle reconciled the Jewish
Kabbalah and Christianity; when Abelard, Saint Bernard, Saint
Thomas, Roger Bacon, and Gerson gave new life to the theories of
Aristotle; when Arab works spread throughout the University of Paris.
It was also the time when Marsilio Ficino, perceiving the philosophical
continuity connecting the systems of Zoroaster, Hermes, Orpheus,
Pythagoras, and Plato, developed them further with the assistance of
the Kabbalah and Christian philosophy. Meanwhile his colleague, Pico
della Mirandola was kabbalistically analyzing Genesis and declaring
that no science proved Christ's divinity better than Magic. Another
Renaissance scholar, Pietro Pomponazzi, was denying, in the name of
Aristotle, the immortality of the soul, or the immortality of conscious-
ness; and was establishing that everything occurs in the world through
generation, in accordance with necessary laws; and was daring to found
a morality that was based on its own merits, one that was disinterested
in either hopes or fears of another life. Not one of these philosophers
was accused of heresy. The only one of those mentioned here who ran
afoul of the authorities, Roger Bacon, was imprisoned for sorcery, not
heresy.
The fable that the Middle Ages were the Dark Ages must be aban-
doned. With respect to certain crimes of intolerance, such as the
Albigensian Crusade, or the condemnation of the Templars, medieval
motives are much more easily explained as originating from politics
rather than from any impulse to combat heresy. Heresy merely served
as a pretext for seeming intolerance. True intolerance was born with the
Reformation.
When we grasp the ferment of ideas and freedom of expression that
was truly characteristic of the Middle Ages, it is easy to imagine how
metaphysical questions would have been the natural subject of study
for the elite of the master masons, both clerics and laypeople. Their lan-
guage was the symbol, which was expressed by carved stone in the time
before printed books were available. The mischievousness expressed in
certain sculptures—which were sometimes erotic, to boot—the depictions
of bears and foxes wearing clerical garb, cardinals and popes suffering