The stone transformed by sweat to glory on the Île de la Cité is truly something to see. Its disappearance is truly something to mourn. But that splendid cathedral Notre Dame is so much more than a spectacle. It is best described, in my view, as an article of faith.
The faith that built the cathedral has rebuilt it many times. The faith is itself the cathedral’s preservation. Its qualities can be appreciated in isolation from faith, but the fact of the matter is that faith. Faith keeps it standing.
Notre Dame’s various injuries are too several to recount and its salvation from previous fires may be largely of interest to the construction sector. If you’d like to learn about that sort of stuff, I’ll give you the number of my dad. He’ll tell you all about the vulnerability of renovation sites to fire.
Regrettably, I did not follow my father into the trade, but I did follow him into the faith. Not that it was my decision as an infant to be saved from the possibility of hell, but I am a Roman Catholic, whether I like it or not.
I’d disclose further details of my intimate relationship with the Saviour and His one true church, but it’s boring. Slightly less boring is the power of faith to raise monuments and to tear them down. Quite interesting is the inability of Western leaders, writers and people who are banging on that they Stand With Paris to describe the faith that has led to an outpouring of tantrums.
I do understand that there is great grief for this loss. I also understand that it is not only felt by Roman Catholics. In fact, my Catholic family are far less moved to mourn than the very secular press. Without wishing to challenge the misery genuinely felt by many, I haven’t seen purple prose like this since my own at 14:
It feels as though the very heart of France and the soul of Europe have been suddenly and viciously ripped out. – The Guardian editorial
It’s the French for whom this building represents a shared history — a great Gothic splendour where kings prayed.” – Andrew Bolt
This is not simply to say “dry your tears”; although, do. It is not to say that my tears are more sacred. I may have shed one or two, but these were for the hairball of historical madness choking the West.
Yes. Have your grief. I get it. Not only do I sense it, but I understand a little Western misery. The US hegemon is in freefall and the European project is in crisis. The West and all its institutions are in ruins and our cultural primacy is under threat. But the threat to all our fine Western Initiations is not a fire one can see. It’s a garbage fire created by those institutions.
“Devastation” is a term used better by my family to describe the very deep wound in Mother Church. Perhaps you’ve heard: there’s been an issue-or-two. Perhaps you might understand that a Roman Catholic might see hope in the damage. One woman’s powerful symbol of Western hope is another’s powerful symbol of resurrection within the faith. A burning building is a chance for rebirth. A West entirely blind to its own insoluble faith is a chance only for death.
After all, there’s another monument slightly older than Notre Dame also under threat right now. Victoria’s Djap Wurrung trees stand today as they have since the time of the cathedral’s construction, and the VicRoads authority has planned to tear them down. One is an 800-year-old monument to birth. Its devastation is planned.
Europe is full of beautiful buildings and the West has a billionaire class eager to preserve them. They have pitched into a preservation plate for a cathedral always upheld by faith. For all the splendour of divinity, it is not a tragedy. Nothing has been lost. Whether this is the monument into which you place your faith in “outstanding architecture” or outstanding Western liberal democracy, see what your faith is and ask why you are blind to all the rest.
Notre Dame is in the eye of the beholder. When I look at the Sydney Opera House I see Paul Robeson singing to the workers sitting on the barely started foundations with their bits of reinforcing steel sticking out her and there. The Harbour Bridge, I see the riveters and welders and painters way up there on the edge of the slowly closing gap, and I imagine those who fell. When I think of a great European cathedral I see the scaffolders and masons and carpenters and glaziers and all the rest at work, forever at work over the centuries, living their lives, trying to say something, resisting entropy. They are dead, and some new ones are to be employed. So yes, dry your tears.
At Chartres, “within the tympanum at the right bay of the royal portal of Chartres Cathedral, situated on top of the middle column of the right jamb” (thanks wikipedia) is a stone carving of Pythagoras. To me it is one of the most moving of all human representations
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pythagore-chartres.jpg
I would take a while to dry my tears if it were lost.
To look up through the vaulted arches of any gothic cathedral, through the stained glass windows, is to look up through any tall forrest through trees, at the sky. Gothic cathedrals weren’t the first landscapes created by humans as worship but they are pretty much unassailable as the epitome of the trope. It is to say we get it God. Notre Dame was pretty much top of the pile. It will be put back there.
So Helen, when you mention the Djup Warren trees you do hit the nail on the head. The people who worshipped those trees didn’t need to build a cathedral to worship something, because they were not so far away from the forrest as to need to replicate it. And you can’t say the could not have done so because they were smart enough. They just didn’t need to go that way. I look out at a tea tree from my kitchen and watch the maggies, kooks, pied currawongs, a limp winged crow on one leg, blue faced honey eaters, etc and . . . what? That tree can give as visceral a sense of space on a good day as any cathedral.
We are still poisoning their water holes.
“see what your faith is and ask why you are blind to all the rest.”
Well, what is your faith Helen? A cultural Christian or one with the supernatural Divine One thrown in? A Marxist Christian who believes Christ was really a Communist like some of the revolutionary priests of Latin America?
Reading your past efforts at political economy, I always thought you beliefs were common or garden Marxist warrior; rather than tortured Roman Catholic worrier.
Can’t help myself Moriaty but just what is your point? I’ve come across people who are both, at the same time.
Does that stress you?
Tell us why.
Well Awkward, it does not stress me; but it does intrigue me that one person (Razer) can believe in two contradictory systems of thought at the same time.
Marxism is an atheist faith which holds that belief in a supernatural God (the main monotheistic religions of the world) is an ‘opiate of the people’.
I was exposed to the semi-official ‘State’ religion of Anglicanism and its Communions, which held with other Protestant faiths that one did not need a priest to communicate in person with your God, but could also have a version of Henry VIII bells and smells.
I still enjoy the hymns and the ritual, and have much respect for the single idea that anyone can go to a place and share a peaceful communion with other people; give voluntary time and resources to help the sick and those in need and contribute to the social capital of our communities.
But even as a kid, I never believed in the supernatural bits, although as an applied scientist, I can understand that humans can’t quite believe that their self-awareness and intelligence far different from any other mammal in the natural world, was a simple chance mutation slightly removed from our primate relatives.