The Secret History of Freemasonry

212 FROM THE ART OF BUILDING TO THE ART OF THINKING

properties and effects of these forces, the science of numbers and meas-
ures, geometry, and arithmetic. Because the science and practice of this
speciality had to remain the privilege of craft masters, it was necessary
to avoid at all costs divulging anything to "laypeople" or to competitors.
It was forbidden to teach the art of building to simple manual labor-
ers. In order to maintain their monopoly, all builders were enjoined to
jealously use secrecy.* The necessity of prudence also dictated the
impossibility of writing down the principles of the art, which explains
why we have no architectural treatises from the Middle Ages except
for the album of Villard de Honnecourt, which is unintelligible to the
noninitiated.+
Because of the sacred nature of anything related to work and the
secrecy explicit in their oath, any builder's revelation would have been
tantamount to sacrilege. To gaurantee the international unity required
by their craft, it was necessary that freemasons own privileges and fran-
chises that transcended the temporal and were valid in all lands.
Fulfilling this need was the role of the Church. It was also necessary
that builders share common signs and a universal language by which
they could recognize one another. Esoterically, this need was fulfilled
by the use of symbols; exoterically, it was met by use of the French
language.

International Privileges

The Church was the sole power capable of granting and guaranteeing
to builders a privilege of internationality that earned them "freedom of
passage." Generally speaking, the Chruch was a constant presence in
the performance of work. In this instance, its intervention was given
even more justification because the work consisted mostly of the con-

• According to Etienne Boileau's Livre des Metiers, masons, mortar makers, and plas-
  terers could have "as many assistants and valets of their trade as it pleased them, pro-
  vided they revealed to none of them any information about their craft." Article 13 of
  the statutes of the Ratisbonne stonecutters from 14+ 58 listed similar prescriptions.
  C. Enlart, 68. "In the Middle Ages artistic or industrial property was understood and
  protected differently from how we envision it. It was not the monopoly of a single model
  for the benefit of its inventor but the monopoly of a kind of labor for the benefit of a
  corporation."