Five and a half years ago the world watched as the venerable roof of the icon of Paris incinerated. It was April 15, 2019.
Father Jean-Marc Fournier, chaplain of the Paris Fire Brigade, went fearlessly headlong into the smoldering cathedral on a rescue operation. He emerged with the Blessed Sacrament and Notre-Dame’s most celebrated relic, the Crown of Thorns, procured by the only canonized French king, Saint Louis IX, from the last Latin emperor of Constantinople, Baldwin II, in 1239. The grief over the soul of Paris that day, if not the whole of France, was palpable. At the same time, however, it was not difficult to see in the destruction of Paris’s spiritual landmark a metaphor for France and Europe’s vanishing attachment to religion, particularly Catholicism.
It was a somber reminder, however, of why the world needs cathedrals.
“We will rebuild Notre Dame,” Macron vowed the night of the fire. “Because that’s what the French expect and because it is what our history deserves.”
Now, the interior of that triumph of medieval sacred architecture has been restored, thanks to the investments of construction crews, donors — 340,000 in 150 countries raised $891 million — and the fortitude of the Archdiocese of Paris, which refused to entertain ideas of rebuilding the cathedral into a temple of new ageism.
The refurbished interior is nevertheless startling. Gone is the pervading gloom and darkness punctuated by splints of stained-glass enforced Paris sunlight. While the tone of the interior may be different, when liturgies resume on December 8 — the Feast of the Immaculate Conception — the function of the cathedral will stay the same: as a repository for the Eucharistic Lord, the same yesterday, today and forever.
Here we might further contemplate the presence of the divine amid structures made by human hand by looking to St. Bernard of Clairvaux: “What is God? Length and Breadth and Height and Depth” (De Consideratione, XIII). Bernard further expands:
“What, therefore, is God? I answer: Length because of Its eternity, Breadth because of Its charity, Height because of Its majesty, Depth because of Its wisdom.”
St. Bernard’s definition of God was inspired by an insight from St. Paul:
“For this reason I kneel before the Father, that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the holy ones what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ” (Eph. 3:14, 17–19).
St. Paul and St. Bernard here give us the dimensions of both God and a church building, the blueprints for rediscovering the majesty of the sacred.
In appreciation for the triumphant return of Notre Dame, let’s take a tour through some of Notre Dame’s profound moments of spiritual influence as a portal to Christian conversion and redemption.
Christmas Day, 1886
Benedict XVI liked to tell the story of the conversion of Paul Claudel, the French man of letters and, according to Robert Royal’s A Deeper Vision, a major contributor to the Catholic intellectual tradition of the 20th century. But on Christmas Day in 1886, 18-year-old Claudel, an ardent unbeliever, “standing around” and looking for ways to debunk the faith, heard the choir singing the Magnificat from inside Notre Dame. He entered.
It was Vespers. He leaned against a stone pillar, overwhelmed. When he came out of that venerable cathedral, Claudel later said, “my heart was touched and I believed. I believed with such a strength of adherence, with such an uplifting of my entire being, with such powerful conviction, with such a certainty leaving no room for any kind of doubt, that since then all the books, all the arguments, all the incidents and accidents of a busy life have been unable to shake my faith, nor indeed to affect it in any way.”
Claudel went on to receive six nominations for the Nobel Prize in Literature over his lifetime. A 1984 New York Times article likened Claudel’s plays to those of Shakespeare and Aeschylus.
The Temple of Reason
It is impossible not to overstate the devastation wrought by the French Revolution on France’s Catholic heritage. Archives and ancient treasures were forever discarded in the race to de-Christianize the climate , vaporizing any hope of piecing together a complete picture of things now lost. Dioceses and cathedrals were shuttered; monasteries were plundered, property confiscated and wiped from the map. Secularism, under the auspices of the triumph of reason, became the new law of the land.
At the center was nothing less than a wholesale suppression of Catholicism as it had been known since Charlemagne, and in many ways that goal was achieved. The political chaos and intense drama from the Storming of the Bastille on July 14, 1789 to the final defeat of Napoleon more than twenty years later must have been nothing less than shocking for the average French citizen to witness.
Notre Dame was ignobly reappropriated as a Temple of Reason. In the suppression of Christianity, the atheistic regime under Maximilian Robespierre and his Reign of Terror replaced the liturgy with their own type of worship, known as the Cult of the Supreme Being. Instead of worshipping the Holy Trinity, their gods were liberté, égalité, fraternité — the revolution motto, “liberty, equality, fraternity” still proudly championed today.
As in other cathedrals, the “Goddess of Liberty,” venerated by women resembling the Vestal Virgins from ancient Rome, was so too “honored” inside Notre Dame, images and statues of the Blessed Mother hidden away and replaced. Stunning high altars were dismantled. Feasts, festivals and homilies honoring “liberty” replaced the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass and reflections on the Gospels. Those who kept the faith bided time underground, and when the storm passed, the faith returned to France. But it was never the same as before the revolution.
An Artistic Muse
From the time of its twelfth century foundations, Notre Dame has served as an artistic inspiration: Victor Hugo’s Quasimodo the hunchback being the titular example. I submit Disney’s 1996 animated adaptation of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, which earned a four-star review by renowned critic (and Catholic) Roger Ebert, is a fantastic visual testament to Notre Dame.
French female filmmaker Alice Guy directed La Esméralda, a ten-minute silent short film in1905 based on Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre-Dame.
The 1987 children’s book, Minou by Mary Bingham, is a wonderful story about self-reliance when a pampered Parisian cat, Minou, is forced to fend for herself after the death of her elderly owner. Told in luscious watercolors, Minou finds work chasing mice inside Notre Dame, and is cared for by the priests at the cathedral rectory.
Marcel Proust (1871–1922) was an essayist and novelist who wrote the staggering tome in multiple volumes, In Search of Lost Time. In On Looking Back One Learns to See, a 2014 biography on Proust, Mary Bergman wrote, “Notre Dame was spellbinding for Proust. He was even known to have thrown on a fur-lined overcoat over his nightshirt and to have stood in front of it for two hours in order to receive fresh inspiration from the portal of Saint Anne.”
Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Italian film The Gospel According to Saint Matthew, which landed on the Vatican’s list of forty-give great films in 1995, was screened inside Notre Dame by the International Catholic Office when it was released in 1964. The film transcends the politics of its creator and its time period and remains one of the most potent adaptations of the life of Christ to be realized on the big screen.
Notre Dame reminds us of the inherent Catholicism of France, no matter how far the country has strayed from those roots. Its fire showed how much it meant to Parisians and the world over. Its triumphant return is a symbol that God, despite everything, is still with us.
After all, you, my Lady, made the first move.
For I was only one of those “standing around” in the
sullen inattentive crowd,
One element, “standing around,” lost in the center of
the trampling crowded mob,
That mass of bodies of the people under their clothes
and of flaccid hearts which held me pinned
against that pillar.
Paul Claudel, “December 25, 1886” (from his Visages Radieux)