development of freemasonry, the connection to urban space becomes evident. The cathedral/church of European style representing an ideal construction is at the core of a city, the centre of human settlement. Craftsmen created edifices in a similar style across European space at a time when religious teachings were more or less homogeneous. If modern freemasonry even after the Reformation inherited these


values, it is only another step in the same direction that its expansion during the 18th century is by and large a European urban development and with its ideology showing elements of universal values – transformed into an Enlightenment context.


Difference and similarity


The political discourse of the 17th century was dominated by an aggressive dichotomy between the two branches of West European Christian belief, Catholicism and Protestantism. During the negotiations that led to the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, however, theories of natural law had an important impact upon the concepts of European space that were predominant at least until the Vienna Congress in 1815. One basic element of political theory was the European territorial state, with its assumed right of self-determination and independence. Supporting these ideas, it was necessary to explain intellectually how and why European states could differ from each other. Self-determination becomes explanatory only when it is based upon difference, and difference (to make any distinction between the qualities of the One and the significant Other) is a key element of identity and identification. Against such concepts and ideas, counter-concepts evolved during the age of Enlightenment, all containing the basic ingredient of similarity, or rather egalité. Their general idea was that human beings without difference were receptive to a single all- embracingmoral message. Related to this idea is thenotion that many branches of religions and philosophies originate from the same, single and uncorrupted source of knowledge of the true divine, prisca teologia. In 1717, four lodges in London announced the establishment of a Grand Lodge. The organisational and ideological roots of modern organised freemasonry in Europe prior to that event have to be researched further, the predominant and outdated assumption of a distinct cut between “operative” and “speculative” freemasonry has to be abandoned once and for all2.


Acta pacis Westphalicæ


2 Andrew Prescott in ”A History of British Freemasonry 1425-2000” in CRFFWorking Paper Series No.1, Sheffield 2008; www.freemasonry.dept.shef.ac.uk/workingpapers.htm (accessed 22 May 2008) suggests a new periodisation of the development of freemasonry in Great Britain. Here it becomes obvious that the “Gould-


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