What Notre Dame Says about Civilization

“The destruction of Notre Dame has shaken our complacent belief in the permanence of things and the ability for our culture to last without care and cultivation. It reveals and reminds us that life is a fragile thing, and even the strongest bastions dedicated to the eternal can still be brought down.”

April 15 will always be the day that Notre Dame burned. It will always be the day that the gift given to us by the past went up in flames. We should be thankful that the rose windows, the altars, the Pieta, and the organ survived and that the stone structure, art, and holy relics have been saved. We should not be in denial, however: much has still been lost. The roof is completely gone, the spire has collapsed, and much of the cathedral stands devastated. It is hard to write about, especially having been there and witnessed the glories and the wonder of the place for myself. The destruction of Notre Dame has shaken our complacent belief in the permanence of things and the ability for our culture to last without care and cultivation. It reveals and reminds us that life is a fragile thing, and even the strongest bastions dedicated to the eternal can still be brought down.

It is difficult to shake the feeling that our generation has squandered a precious patrimony, a piece of our culture that will be nigh on impossible to replace. As Douglas Murray so eloquently wrote in the Spectator: “Though politicians may imagine that ages are judged on the minutiae of government policy, they are not. They are judged on what they leave behind: most of all on how they treat what the past has handed into their care. Even if today’s disaster was simply the most freakish of accidents, ours would still be the era that lost Notre Dame.”

Culture anchors us and gives expression to the need to feel connected to the community of souls, bound by chords that reverberate up and down the ages, weaving together to create the song of human experience.

We are not simply atomized individuals wandering around aimlessly, choosing from an endless buffet of lifestyle options, browsing our lives away in an endless, apparently eternal now. We are linked to those gone before and those who come after through our culture. For Franz Rosenzweig, religion answers the need we have to believe in immortality: of the continuation of the meaning of our lives beyond death. This longing for immortality is expressed in art, music, philosophy, literature, and architecture. This springs from the metaphysical root of Christianity in the case of Notre Dame and Europe’s other high medieval monuments. Culture anchors us and gives expression to the need to feel connected to the community of souls, bound by chords that reverberate up and down the ages, weaving together to create the song of human experience. We have a responsibility to those yet to be born to ensure that they also have a chance to witness the soul-uplifting beauty of places like Notre Dame, places which deserve our reverence and love and which comprise part of the fabric of our culture.