I was twenty-one when I first set foot in Notre Dame of Paris. I was a young U.S. soldier stationed in Germany and many of my fellow GIs had cautioned me against visiting the city. The Parisians, and all the French for that matter, were rude and hated Americans, so they said. I went anyway and found the opposite. The Parisians were courteous and helpful, especially after I tried using my very limited facility with the French language.
After the Jeu de Paume, Orangerie, and other art spots I was keen to see, I got to Notre Dame. Almost an agnostic then, I wasn’t there for religion. Though years later after I converted to Roman Catholicism, I thought the visit may have stirred something. That’s probably 20/20 hindsight. However, I did feel a great reverence standing in the space that is now covered in ash. I vaguely understood in my youthful lack of wisdom that a cathedral stood here that mattered for millennia past and into the future. That faith, in the West and the promise of our culture, is what I write about today.
It is a notion, the West, even Christendom, that dominated the world for the better part of time since Christ was on Earth. For our oldest ally, it is an ideal that has girded her and us through hard and bitter times of the past. This kind of national security is deeper than military or diplomatic might. It is about the things they exist to protect and preserve.
The flames of yesterday consumed the cathedral, or a great part of it. Thankfully, many of the relics and works of art were saved. The site has stood since the 12th century, a symbol of the consequences of The Battle of Tours and other stands that defended the Western idea, still in germination, against threats from beyond. Notre Dame is what happens when man aspires toward the best of his nature. When beauty, faith, and culture combine like that the result can be immortal. Not just in wood and mortar, that can be burned to the ground, but in a quest for aesthetic greatness.
Since that time, though advancing in all other areas, man has lost much of that reverence for faith, for beauty as well. Pope Benedict XVI called Europe “post-Christian” and the European worldview has been subsumed for over a century into a pop culture avant garde that seeks to deform and destroy concepts of elegance and substitute them for blind rebellion and mindless ignorance of the centuries that came before. Roger Scruton, when not being harassed by the Thought Police, is the reigning eloquent authority on this matter.
French President Emmanuel Macron vows to rebuild the cathedral to its former glory. A French billionaire has promised over $100 million toward the goal. What they likely don’t get is that the vow and pledge will be difficult ones to keep, as that kind of glory is not easily reconstituted by a modern society that has little knowledge of the basis for its appreciation. As France herself, through the European Union, bends the knee to the Germans and follows every trendoid political and cultural fashion 21st century pretentious hokum can conjure up, can she even begin to reconsecrate such a space?
It is fitting in a way that this fire happened in Holy Week, as it may give the Europeans and also ourselves a more focused opportunity to reflect on what is lost with the virtual sacking of our heritage by those who did a more thorough job than Alaric ever contemplated.
Perhaps there is a chance to rescue a thing of value from the embers and ashes. If so it will only be done with a rededication to a greater good than the modern pieties that have taken the place of beauty and excellence. It must safeguard the numinous luster of the cathedral and the transcendence of the culture it once represented. In a hopeful sign of that, after the conflagration, the cross at the high altar still stands.
For what really still burns at Notre Dame is an illumination that surpasses the commonplace, lifting the mind and spirit to heights above the everyday and into grace. Toward that end, not only of a mere façade or structure, must the rebuilding commence.
