Cathedral

Parvis of the cathedral in 1699, via Wikimedia Commons.

As Twitter watched the cathedral burn, I was glued to it, teary-eyed sometimes, and found myself startled every so often by a message from some big head person offering condolences to the Roman Catholic church or to French Catholics in particular, generally from a conservative standpoint:

Notre Dame is an iconic symbol of faith to people all over the world – and it is heartbreaking to see a house of God in flames. Our thoughts and prayers are with the firefighters on the scene and all the people of Paris. https://t.co/5Pecbf02em

— Vice President Mike Pence (@VP) April 15, 2019

I'm like really? That's the heartbreak?

And sometimes really offensively, as in the case of young Ben Shapiro, who had to be spoken to sharply:

You are such a preening buffoonish ignoramus. Ground was broken on the cathedral in 1163. Roughly 20 years later, while building was just underway, the King despoiled the Jews of France of all their property and expelled them from his kingdom. https://t.co/lXkZqgDBtD

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) April 15, 2019

And Dinesh, of course, truly grotesque:

This woman has a talent for giving offense. Art and architecture? We are talking about one of the great sacred sites of Christianity. If the great mosque in Cairo goes up in flames would she respond in a similar way? https://t.co/hLc9Y8mtYk

— Dinesh D'Souza (@DineshDSouza) April 16, 2019

As if we didn't all know he's a renegade apostate Catholic who's abandoned all the sacraments and 500 years of family history from the time of St. Francis Xavier, who created all of Goa's D'Souzas and D'Cruzes and De Mellos in the 16th century, to be a fornicator and a liar and a member of something called the Calvary Chapel, an offshoot of Aimee Semple McPherson's Foursquare Gospel Church that predicted the Second Coming of Christ in 1981, and that D'Souza abandoned in 2010, opting to travel instead from campus to campus lecturing people about Christianity while not electing to go to services anywhere.

Jonah Goldberg reacts with magnificent stupidity to a really fascinating piece by E.J.Dickson in Rolling Stone:

This is the most asinine thing I’ve read on the fire to date. And a competitor in the all around asinine category. https://t.co/OiQf5zDk3P

— Jonah Goldberg (@JonahNRO) April 17, 2019

Dickson's take relates to the fact that we're talking about two very different cathedrals, the wondrous thing that went up in the 12th and 13th century representing the apex of medieval technology, and the fairy tale whimsy overlaid on it by Viollet-le-Duc in the mid-19th century, with the wispily lovely spire. The architect's main dilemma is whether to restore the Second Empire equivalent of Disneyfication or the real Gothic thing those stonemasons meant 800 years ago, and the fire is what gives architects the chance to make the choice—it's a liberation in that sense, and it would be lovely if they'd dare to make the radical historically informed choice, though the result wouldn't be as pretty and might even seem a little too solid and squat (see illustration at top) from the outside (congregation doesn't need to open its eyes in astonishment until it gets indoors, in the stained-glass light and soar of the vaulting)..

To Jonah, of course the 21st-century Walt Disney Notre Dame with the whoosh of magical star thingies in the sunrise, looking like the false front of a rural Nevada casino, is the real thing and he can't begin to imagine what these fancy guys are talking about.

My own reaction—a lot like Ilhan Omar's—was focused on the greatness and antiquity of the building, and I wasn't thinking about religion at all, any more than I'd think about who was president when they built the New York Public Library at 5th and 42nd or the Guggenheim. I realize Gothic cathedrals are in fact pretty Catholic, though I'll point out that they made very good Anglican cathedrals too after the Reformation. In a world like northern France in the 12th century, though, where the huge majority of people who were Catholic could scarcely picture an alternative to being Catholic, and all the locally interesting religious issues were on the inside, it really didn't mean as much. We could go on forever about the theological underpinnings of the flying buttresses, but the skill of the stonemasons and the vastness of the conception are what stood out for me, like I don't think about the details of Lutheranism when I'm listening to a Bach organ fugue, which rises so far above its origins as far as I'm concerned—which transcends mere religion, I'm serious.

Speaking of music, Notre Dame also stands at the origin of the Western musical tradition: it was the place where musicians first thought of going beyond the monody of Gregorian chant to sing two different notes at once the school of Notre Dame polyphony, beginning almost exactly the same time as the cathedral itself began to be built, in 1160, and the first great European composers whose names we know, because they signed their work, Léonin and Pérotin.

That sudden appearance of harmonization, on which everything else from Guillaume de Machaut to Frank Zappa is founded, is to me as big a miracle as the Virgin Birth, plus it actually happened, in Paris.



Update: I think the earliest named European great composers were actually Peter Abelard and Hildegard of Bingen, famous for other reasons, composing chant a bit earlier in the century. Amazingly enough, the first great Chinese composer, Jiang Kui the White-Stone Daoist (1155-1221), the first ci poet to create his own qupai melodies, was another contemporary.