274 CONCLUSION
every man his brother, saying, Know the Lord: for they shall all know
me, from the least of them unto the greatest of them" (Jeremiah 31:34).
The effort required by implementation, the path that must be taken,
is the application to acquit ourselves well of every task to which our
human condition makes us heir. This is the Work conceived by all and
on every plane as a sacred gesture, the co-participation in the perpetual
creation of the Great Work of the Absolute. The convergence within
man of the finite and the infinite, the simultaneous awareness of humil-
ity and grandeur, were regarded by the operative masons as the best
foundation for morality and social life: humility and grandeur made lib-
erty, equality, and fraternity primary values.
But what heavy demands are made upon us to attain these! The
intelligence of a Saint Thomas Acquinas and the sensibility of a Saint
Francis of Assisi while possessing the prescience of Christ's message:
These lead to no more exploitation of man by man, no more domina-
tion and humiliation based on social distinctions, no more scorn for the
weak, no more vainglory, no more baseless enrichment, and no more of
anything that degrades the image of the Perfect One from whom the
essence of human beings are crafted.
This in brief is the spiritual, moral, and cultural patrimony of oper-
ative freemasonry in its constitutive tradition. We can of course be fully
aware that all of this never existed either as a whole or as a consequence
of this tradition. But we do know, even if it might appear surprising
from a contemporary perspective with eyes only for material progress,
that all of this was perceived by those who lived during the Middle
Ages—and by the masons better than anyone else. In the facts we know,
touching upon work and human relations, we find no trace of a failure
among them to advance the notions of "fair salaries" and "fair prices"
or to condemn profit or to ignore the rule of fraternity.
Today this has all been forgotten and lost. For those very people
who claim to best speak on behalf of these values as the foundation of
a civilization they ceaselessly invoke, these principles are ignored and
the precepts that arise from them are nothing but empty words that
have no actual effect on behavior. The more attentive individuals regard
these principles only as the historical souvenir of a bygone society that
believed in God's presence among men. They view its precepts as lack-