Rebuilding Notre Dame: is it an art museum, a tourist attraction, or a cathedral?
I suppose at this point, realistically speaking, it’s something of all of them. I wouldn’t have even asked the question if Notre Dame hadn’t burned, but now that the rebuilding is being planned, it seems relevant.
As commenter “Snow on Pine” wrote this morning:
Stein’s question was, were the people crying on the streets in Paris crying primarily over the loss of a building that was, in essence, an exquisite art museum and testament to their past—a crowded tourist exhibit, or were they crying primarily over the destruction of a building that was perhaps the chief symbol of their living Christian faith?
Similarly, was Macron’s pledge to rebuild Notre Dame a civic pledge to rebuild what is basically an art museum, or was it an act of faith, a pledge to rebuild perhaps the chief symbol of the Christian faith of the people of France?
I cannot answer the question. I do know that the people in the streets of Paris who were crying as they saw the fire were sad and shocked. It was probably about a number of things, some of which they may not have thought much about previously, such as what exactly Notre Dame the building means to them and to France (not necessarily the same) at this point. Was it mostly the Catholic faithful assembled there, praying and singing? And what percentage of the whole does this now represent?
In a previous post from 2016 on the loss of Christian faith in Europe, I quoted the 19th Century British poet Matthew Arnold, and in this 2006 post I quoted the British Philip Larkin in his 1955 poem “Churchgoing” on the subject of churches in an age of waning faith. He describes a cycling trip in England, where he stops to rest at a church much smaller than Notre Dame:
Up at the holy end; the small neat organ;
And a tense, musty, unignorable silence,
Brewed God knows how long. Hatless, I take off
My cycle-clips in awkward reverence,
Move forward, run my hand around the font.
From where I stand, the roof looks almost new-
Cleaned or restored? Someone would know: I don’t.
Mounting the lectern, I peruse a few
Hectoring large-scale verses, and pronounce
“Here endeth” much more loudly than I’d meant.
The echoes snigger briefly. Back at the door
I sign the book, donate an Irish sixpence,
Reflect the place was not worth stopping for.Yet stop I did: in fact I often do,
And always end much at a loss like this,
Wondering what to look for; wondering, too,
When churches fall completely out of use
What we shall turn them into…
France is presently engaged in deciding exactly what Notre Dame is to France and its people these days. Personally, I hope it’s built the way it was—minus the flammability, if possible. But I don’t have any say in the matter.
Will the Left have a say?:
Over the course of the past few centuries, the cathedral has played a role in major historical events, from the coronation of kings to the crowning of Napoleon to the requiem mass of President Charles de Gaulle. And Notre Dame has served as a symbol of not just French historical identity, but Catholicism in general. “It has a double meaning,” says Jean-Robert Armogathe, a French Catholic priest and historian who served as the chaplain at Notre Dame from 1980 to 1985. “It has been the center of Catholic life and of France for 800 years.”…
But for some people in France, Notre Dame has also served as a deep-seated symbol of resentment, a monument to a deeply flawed institution and an idealized Christian European France that arguably never existed in the first place. “The building was so overburdened with meaning that its burning feels like an act of liberation,” says Patricio del Real, an architecture historian at Harvard University. If nothing else, the cathedral has been viewed by some as a stodgy reminder of “the old city — the embodiment of the Paris of stone and faith — just as the Eiffel Tower exemplifies the Paris of modernity, joie de vivre and change,” Michael Kimmelmann wrote for the New York Times….Although Macron and donors like Pinault have emphasized that the cathedral should be rebuilt as close to the original as possible, some architectural historians like Brigniani believe that would be complicated, given the many stages of the cathedral’s evolution. “The question becomes, which Notre Dame are you actually rebuilding?,” he says. Harwood, too, believes that it would be a mistake to try to recreate the edifice as it once stood, as LeDuc did more than 150 years ago. Any rebuilding should be a reflection not of an old France, or the France that never was — a non-secular, white European France — but a reflection of the France of today, a France that is currently in the making. “The idea that you can recreate the building is naive. It is to repeat past errors, category errors of thought, and one has to imagine that if anything is done to the building it has to be an expression of what we want — the Catholics of France, the French people — want. What is an expression of who we are now? What does it represent, who is it for?,” he says.
Twitter has been loaded with even more vitriol, as is the nature of Twitter. I certainly hope that Twitter isn’t “who we are now.”
At PjMedia, the always-perceptive Roger Kimball has a good piece questioning why the authorities were so quick to rule out arson, even before the flames had been extinguished. Hundreds of churches have been vandalized in France in recent years, and several Muslims have recently been sentenced for attempts to destroy churches, yet the immediate response was to blame the carelessness of workers.
Notre Dame is a cathedral, a tourist attraction, an art museum, and a monument to Western Civilization.
it all three….
its a floor wax and a desert topping!!! (see saturday night live originals)
on another note..
Rush Limbaugh
no we havent… not at all…
they were training kids and i worked for a short time..
we are still building the worlds largest…
Memories Chiseled in a Cathedral’s Stone
https://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/23/nyregion/memories-chiseled-in-a-cathedral-s-stone.html
https://untappedcities-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/nypl.digitalcollections.510d47e2-8b37-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99.001.w.jpg
I presume that those on the Left–which is to say quite a few influential people these days in Academia, in the Arts, in Architecture, in the MSM, and in the Commentariat–will push to make a rebuilt Notre Dame be “relevant,” and to reflect their idea of today’s politically correct, “multicultural France.”
Thus, we could even possibly end up seeing a “re-imagined” Notre Dame being the equivalent in stone of one of those sappy “coexist” bumper stickers.
I suspect that those who will push to recreate the old Notre Dame, as it was was at the time of this fire, are likely be outvoted.
“But for some people in France, Notre Dame has also served as a deep-seated symbol of resentment, a monument to a deeply flawed institution and an idealized Christian European France that arguably never existed in the first place. “The building was so overburdened with meaning that its burning feels like an act of liberation,” says Patricio del Real, ”
Spoken like a true left wing liberal. Would he want a Mosque to replace it? Most likely.
Yes, that Roger Kimball article raised important questions. I’ve refrained from coming to any judgment about the cause until more is released on why the authorities think it was an accident.
Perhaps they have some specific information from workers that would lead them to that conclusion so early in the game. But till we know more, the jury is out. In fact, we haven’t even heard the evidence yet.
When the flames were still licking the sky and all talk of “rebuild” broke out from the shuddering mobs…I asked “In today’s France, who is going to do that?”
Which “vision” of Notre Dame’s Cathedral will end up being re-constructed?
Obviously no one end result will please all of France, or all those around the globe who are heartbroken by the cathedral’s damage, but what sort of political and social capital will be spent on the public (not just Twitter) vitriol that is sure to ensue? And will France recover from that?
The AP article I linked earlier said that presumed instability in the structure has prevented fire inspection at the site of the blaze origin as yet (some hours ago now). Until that physical examination is undertaken no one can know much, I think.
“Rebuilding Notre Dame: is it an art museum, a tourist attraction, or a cathedral?”
The order in which those choices are presented, perfectly reflects the priorities of modern France. And that is why, if Notre Dame is restored, it will in the not too distant future become a Mosque.
France is a ‘dead man’ walking.
It is however, damned decent of the French along with W. Europe, to voluntarily act as the West’s “canary in the coal mine”. Can fraternité get any nobler?
BTW, people have mentioned that French authorities declared that the fire was not the result of arson… but did so hours before the flames were even out. As another commenter pointed out, I too had no idea that the French were so expert at forensic investigations into a fire’s origin… even from afar.
Those quotes at the end confirm my fears that Notre Dame as it once was–a thing of aesthetic beauty, a symbol of spiritual meaning–is dead forever.
It’s chilling to read how many on the Left are happy it burned.
Given recent holy wars against Catholics by internal Vatican/Catholic loyalists, symbols such as a building (Notre which was also used to crown Emperors/Kings by the faith of the human organizations that proclaimed themselves Divine) is a hit to national prestige, religious prestige, and also cultural prestige.
This is not a hit that some Europeans can tolerate, given what else is going on.
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/nuns-as-sex-slaves/
https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/qvyky3/pope-francis-admits-catholic-priests-used-nuns-as-sex-slaves
Looking at the Yougov survey of the current public image of the Church of Rome amongst Catholic faithful and non Catholicful (faithful), it is interesting to see that support for P Francis is still going strong (stronger than 59% Trum of ye olden years), but that the image of this particular Church has gone way down. Not even the faithful are willingly to push the line that the institution lacks problems (that it was just old abuse in the past).
I get it. Any organization has a need to defend itself and its tithing coffers. Strangely enough, the Protestant churches in the US tend to target the LDS peeps over in Utah more than the Catholics. Didn’t the Protestants split off from the Church of Rome after Luther called the P “the Whore of Babylon or Rome” or some such, and also “Anti Christ”? Protestants perhaps forgot who they have been protesting.
France is a ‘dead man’ walking.
GB, not a good thing for the United States, I hope people realize. France still has dozens of functioning thermonuclear reactors designed to enrich weapons grade uranium.
Not even a bomb, just the material itself shipped to the US through Mexico would disrupt water, food, and all other things in city life.
Of course, that doesn’t even cover why the Deep State wants to own nuclear fissile “waste”. If it is waste, send it to the moon or the Sun, NASA! Can’t get out of Low Earth Orbit, haha.
As for Notre’s rebuilding, so long as the Altar itself was damaged or destroyed, the rest is easy. I am satisfied at the conclusion one way or another. There has been quite the amount of blood, lust, and human corrupt spilled on that altar. It is time to get a new one.
I love Gothic churches because the space makes you look up and feel how much bigger the world is than you. You don’t have to attach that feeling to a specific verse of the Bible. I love Follett’s book The Pillars of the Earth because that connects you with all the flawed humanity that made it possible. In contrast, Baroque churches seem more like the wealthy and powerful showing off. It is this connection that makes Notre Dame more than an art museum. It may be just a tourist attraction for some, but I suspect that most people have a different response when they actual enter it and see the windows and ceilings.
Yammer. You might want to remember that the Feds “own” quite a bit a nuclear waste already (Hanford Nuclear Reservation, Savanah River, Oak Ridge, Nevada Test Site). But other than that you make perfect sense, such as shooting nuclear waste to the Sun (kind of spendy and risky; oops rocket go boom, sorry). Comedy gold.
France still has dozens of functioning thermonuclear reactors designed to enrich weapons grade uranium.
Plus their own French arsenal of nuclear weapons. During the Cold War, I heard, about half of those weapons were aimed at the US in case we left Europe hanging in the event of a Soviet nuclear attack limited to Europe.
I can’t find a source on that today. Wiki summarizes the French concern:
Since then France has developed and maintained its own nuclear deterrent, one intended to defend France even if the United States refused to risk its own cities by assisting Western Europe in a nuclear war.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/France_and_weapons_of_mass_destruction
‘Blood, lust, and corruption’ down through the ages taints human nature. I see no reason to lay that on the alter of Notre Dame specifically, it is a masterpiece of Western Civilization.
Huxley, Yammer has confused a nuclear reactor (splitting uranium or plutonium or thorium) with a thermonuclear reactor (fusion of hydrogen isotopes). Sorry, but no one has a “functioning” thermonuclear reactor yet. France has numerous nuclear reactors. Parker knows a lot more about this than me BTW. France did most of it’s weapons tests in the South Pacific another BTW.
;
Possibly the people pledging the big money will get to say what is done with the restoration work.
om is correct, fusion reactors do not exist. Remember the ‘cold fusion’ wishful silliness at the turn of the century? Fusion as a source of controllable power is an iffy proposition for the foreseeable future, perhaps forever.
GB, “And that is why, if Notre Dame is restored, it will in the not too distant future become a Mosque.” This is not unprecedented. Hagia Sophia in Istanbul (Constantinople) is a Byzantine church built in 520 AD and was turned into a mosque when the Turks conquered Constantinople in 1453. Most of the decoration was striped though there has been an effort in recent years to recover the iconography painted on the walls. It’s worth a visit. It also goes to show that despite the “magnificence of Muslim civilization” they have never been capable of matching Western civilization. It is an entirely parasitic civilization.
Whether the people of France have the will to prevent such a thing is up for grabs. The government’s behavior is not reassuring but maybe the yellow vests would fight it.
I was actually thinking earlier today, “Man, I wouldn’t want to be on that reconstruction committee!”
om: I let ymarsakar slide on thermonuclear. However, we agree the French do have regular fission reactors. To some extent those can be used to produce fissile material for bombs.
This was the concern when Saddam Hussein built an Osirak nuclear reactor (from the French, Boo!) and Israel blew the thing up. (Yay!) Likewise the secret Syrian reactor that Israel blew up. (Yay!)
It’s not ideal to use a commercial nuclear power reactor for producing material for nuclear fission bombs, but it can be done.
Sounds like a job for physicsguy, perhaps, to explain the ins-and-outs.
Paul,
We can also add the the Mezquita of Cordoba, in which after booting the Moors from Spain, they built a Catholic cathedral inside of the massive mosque.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosque%E2%80%93Cathedral_of_C%C3%B3rdoba
huxey:
The French used gas-cooled (CO2) graphite-moderated reactors initially to produce their Pu for weapons (and for electricity generation) originally
http://fissilematerials.org/library/cea10c.pdf
In the 1960s the used the fast breeder reactor Phenix to produce Pu for weapons and to generate electricity; see page 44 of the link below
https://www.princeton.edu/sgs/publications/sgs/archive/17-1-Schneider-FBR-France.pdf
Notre Dame is a cathedral, a religious institution. It accommodates scholars and visitors, as long as they are respectful of its status as a place of worship.
Christians must accorded all the consideration given to ANY religion.
TownHall gives one of the responses to the above-quoted inanity.
“Rolling Stone is so overburdened with irrelevance that its going out of business will be an act of liberation.”
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/cortneyobrien/2019/04/17/rolling-stone-magazine-ripped-for-this-take-on-the-notre-dame-fire-n2544919
its burning feels like an act of liberation,” says Patricio del Real, an architecture historian at Harvard University.
What a surprise. A leftist pyromaniacal Harvard faculty member.
His name is del Real. Quite an irony there, since Real means King, as in el Camino Real, the King’s Highway.
France gets 50+% of it’s electrical power from nukes. They have a solid, safe system. Yes, they are idiots when it comes to immigration. But that could change at the blink of an eye. France is not just Paris, the unwashed masses of rural France are just like us, deplorables.
Every reactor, can product fissile material, except thorium salr reactors.The only quesrion is what we do with that wasre. Of course right thinking governments store it for accumulating fissile material for bombs/warheads. To do otherwise is stupid. The knowledge to create nuclear weapons escaped Pandora’s box decades ago.
parker on April 17, 2019 at 6:05 pm at 6:05 pm said:
‘Blood, lust, and corruption’ down through the ages taints human nature. I see no reason to lay that on the alter of Notre Dame specifically, it is a masterpiece of Western Civilization.
That’s because they actually put the sacrifices on the altar, literally or physically.
You’d have to see the stories of Vatican insiders for how or why. The problem with having an institution too old is that there are many many skeletons in that closet.
Fusion as a source of controllable power is an iffy proposition for the foreseeable future, perhaps forever.
That’s because the fundamental theory of gravity has too many flaws for them to make a controlled gravity application, let alone a sun fusion core.
I use the term “thermonuclear” to refer to temperature controlled steam engines driven by fission. They are literally nuclear generators creating heat or controlling heat, or being controlled by heat sinks and temperature controls. Since fusion isn’t necessarily what they have told us, “thermonuclear” should not be interpreted only based on scientific orthodoxy. I know this ticks some people off that think there can only be one definition of things and that’s what the majority believe or are told to believe.
It’s rather hard for me to get fission and fusion confused, given the problems with gravity in fusion.
The Hagia Sophia, afaik, is not a mosque but does contain a small mosque location out of sight. Most of it is a museum due to Attaturk’s reforms, which have been mostly stripped by the current Turkish totalitarian admin.
Comedy gold.
Shouldn’t you grateful then Omni, for the word salad you often remark on? I seem to remember you being negative about this but recently you find it entertaining, I trust.
Even if the classical physics notion of thermonuclear activation was correct with the hydrogen bombs, that does not mean they have any other application. Nor that nuclear weapons function the way they are described.
For example, most people remember the various nuclear tests, but one video in particular had an interesting effect on the public consciousness. This video was of houses collapsing and in being sucked in by the reverse shock wave.
However, one needed to ask a simple question: why is the camera ok.
I saw pictures and even a short video of people in the streets of Paris singing hymns, some with rosaries in their hands, as ND burned. I think people were upset for all sorts of reasons. Even now, several days later, it’s hard to shake the feeling of catastrophe despite seeing pictures of the interior showing less damage than feared.
A philosophy PhD student was arrested carrying gasoline and lighter fluid into St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York.
Notre Dame is a Cathedral, first – and from its greatness as a Cathedral, and supporting its greatness, is the fantastic art. Thus a living art museum, also great.
Either would make a fine tourist attraction, together it’s a great tourist attraction.
Catholics would be wise to push, strongly, for an invisibly safer, but mostly same looking reconstruction.
And support the gov’t building some other form of art museum which it can use for attracting tourists, but not as the main use of Notre Dame.
The Chinese are destroying thousands of mosques in their active suppression of their 33-50 million Muslims. That’s terrible. Strange how little publicity it gets, so far. Where are the Muslim led boycott China campaigns? Or disinvest?
Yet, they are making it difficult for Chinese Muslims to become terrorists – tho increasing the desire of many Muslims living there to be terrorists.
https://www.rfa.org/english/news/uyghur/udner-the-guise-of-public-safety-12192016140127.html
We need more moderate Muslims to criticize and reform American Muslims so that they can live, peacefully, in a democracy based on Christian – Capitalist values.
We need more moderate Muslims to criticize and reform American Muslims so that they can live, peacefully, in a democracy based on Christian – Capitalist values.
Unfortunately, moderate Muslims are to Islam as RINOs and moderate conservatives are to the Red vs Blue conflict here in the USA.
I remember the original nuclear isotope estimations for Chernobyl and Nagasaki was somewhere in the realm of hundreds if not thousands of years. A few years later, trees and life forms were growing without mutations. Just as the Manhattan Project had onion layer security to protect the core, so is true of nuclear weapons, hydrogen ones or not.
Before I get too distracted by the squirrel paths leading off from the main road: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/19/ordinary-americans-spying-fusion-center-program-aclu
That is what Notre Dam succeeded in distracting people from. America has enough domestic traitors and problems that it is useful to distract people with a foreign affair. Plenty of other holy sites get detonated all the time, but the media were ordered to put this French site up front and center.
Americans fall for it of course. Even though they make jokes about the French and claim they do not trust the media. Americans don’t trust the media, except the 85% of the time they do.
I stumbled upon this striking passage in D. Stephenson Bond’s 1993 book, “Living Myth: Personal Meaning As A Way of Life,” some years ago, and I thought his metaphor presented a very insightful image of what has happened as Christianity has waned in the West.
Chapter 2. Twilight of the Gods
“It is an odd thing to fall out of a myth. It is like standing on the shore and looking back in astonishment at the myth from which you’ve so recently emerged, a beached whale lying in the summer sun. Only yesterday you were in the belly of the whale with no idea of just how contained you really were, just how much larger the vast sea could really be. Seeing your life now from outside the myth, everything upon which you had formerly stood is revalued in an instant. And great sadness, like waves along the sand, washes over the realization that such a living body, such a thing of beauty, should lie in silent rigor, exposed to time and long decay until the tide should seek the moon and bear away the bones to untold depths.
It is odd, but less and less uncommon, to see survivors of the fall staggering from the wreckage. One by one they wander out, blinking in the sunlight, unsure of just what’s happened. There are those who continue to feed off the corpse. They feed on the body of the myth, incorporating the last vestiges of its mana. They suck the last drops it its life blood. At least they are fed. The dry bones that are left for the scholars to pick over, who no longer try to even feed but, like paleontologists, try to reconstruct what it might have looked like in its day. There are those who walk away and leave the carcass to the vultures. They walk away because they see the myth for what it is—a shell no longer speaking, a lifeless form without breath, a heart no longer beating. And so they search the endless sand as if they could survive by strength of will and wits alone, but shortly they may die, because they cannot go on living without a myth to feed them.”
“…A myth is alive when it shows a way of life, a lifestyle, a structure of daily living. A myth has become a fossil when it is no longer a way of life that satisfies. “ pp. 27-28.
Words mean whatever Yammer wants them to be. Whatever, continue as you will, to seek attention.
I agree very strongly. Not only all Catholics, but all Christians, should push for the restoration of the church that was to the greatest extent possible. Medieval persecutions of heretics and of Jews, so offensive to modern Christians, do not negate the essential Christian message the cathedral presents. Other faiths, and secularists, have their own shrines.
ymarsakar:
The cameras: see this, this, and this.
Conspiracy theorists like to find one technical aspect of an event to criticize—for example, with the Kennedy assassination it often has to do with the rifle. I have not found any of these arguments convincing in the least.
Snow on Pine on April 18, 2019 at 9:32 am at 9:32 am said:
I stumbled upon this striking passage in D. Stephenson Bond’s 1993 book, “Living Myth: Personal Meaning As A Way of Life,” some years ago, and I thought his metaphor presented a very insightful image of what has happened as Christianity has waned in the West.
* * *
Thanks —
Reading the comments here is like riffing through the stacks of an old library.
(but some people don’t like those)
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/smokeless-cathedral-burn-libraries-humanities
Now I see that the Rector of Notre Dame is quoted as resorting to the well-worn, all purpose excuse of “a computer glitch” as the source of the fire at Notre Dame.
I’m surprised that they haven’t yet blamed a never before actually seen Phoenix for the blaze, one that for some inexplicable reason landed on the roof, and then burst into flame, as the old Beastiaries have told us the legendary Phoenix is want to do.
Given the fact that has just come to public consciousness–into my ken–that there have been a continuing and enormous number of previous attacks against churches in France–875 in just last year alone–when added to the news of the dozen or so attacks that occurred in just the last two weeks–which included last week’s arson attempt against the oldest Cathedral in France, the 11th century Cathedral of St. Denis, located in a Muslim “no-go zone” just outside Paris–forgive me for thinking that that this fire, as well–occurring very suspiciously during Holy Week, just a few days before Easter–was, odds are, also a Muslim terrorist attack.
However, as I have opined here before, if it was such a Muslim terrorist attack, the French authorities won’t/don’t dare say it was.
Who knows, if they did make such an announcement, perhaps it might even rouse some portion of the sleeping and cowed French populace.
Perhaps, as well, it might force the government to directly acknowledge and confront the Muslim invasion of France, and it’s existential consequences for native Frenchmen, for the nation of France, and it’s continued existence.
Can’t have that.