Thoughts During the Burning of Notre Dame

On April 15, I came in from mowing the lawn and turned on the news to find that a fire had broken out at one of the great monuments of the Western world. Cathédrale Basilique Notre Dame de Paris was about to suffer a terrible tragedy. For the rest of the day and well into the night, I watched centuries of art, culture, and history rendered into ash and embers as firefighters and priests struggled to save what they could. I have never set foot in France, nor have I ever been inside any Catholic church building, let alone a cathedral so magnificent as Notre Dame. But I felt a kinship with strangers through space and time on that day, for we share deep historical roots despite our differences.

I listened to the newscasters tell the audience of the history of the building; how it was built during the 12th and 13th centuries, then modified and renovated several times thereafter; how it played host to calls for the Crusades, coronations, baptisms, and funerals; how it was vandalized and threatened with destruction on several occasions, from the Huguenots to the French Revolution to the Nazis, only to catch fire that fateful day. They spoke of the men who built it, how they knew that they were building not for themselves but for posterity, as they would never live to see it finished. I recalled the work of the French intellectual Georges Bataille. Though a Catholic early in life who became an atheist[1], his understanding of religious notions of expenditure, loss, and sacrifice[2] was unparalleled among modern philosophers. Bataille considered how ruling classes in pre-modern times spent fortunes on “the production of sacred things” that would serve as a rallying point for a culture through the creation and reinforcement of immaterial, transcendent, spiritual values. Bataille criticized the ruling classes of his day, and would say even worse of today's rulers, for failing to understand this principle of material loss for immaterial gain, instead being pathologically committed to the maximization of materialist utility.[3]

As the fire spread, the talking heads called in other members of the pundit class to offer their thoughts. Much of this went as aforementioned, discussing the history and symbolism of the building as well as their own experiences in visiting it. But a few commentators dared to speak of what might have caused the fire. All such speculation was quickly hushed and denigrated as spreading conspiracy theories[4], even though church vandalism in France has been on the rise recently[5] and there were declared to be no signs of arson well before a proper investigation could possibly have concluded.[6] In fairness, this is understandable in a sense; too many reprisals have occurred throughout history because a culprit was blamed before the evidence was properly examined. But I had to wonder: would such speculation of potential arson be shut down so quickly if it were a historic mosque or synagogue burning instead?

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References:

1. Surya, Michel; Krzysztof Fijalkowski and Michael Richardson trans. (2002). Georges Bataille: an intellectual biography. London: Verso.
2. Bataille, Georges (1933). The Notion of Expenditure.
3. Grenouille, Jérôme Bernard (2018, Mar. 22). “The Principle Of Loss: A Reactionary’s Introduction To Georges Bataille”. Social Matter.
4. Porter, Tom. (2019, Apr. 16). “As Notre-Dame burned, alt-right figures launched a campaign on social media falsely blaming Muslims for the blaze”. Business Insider.
5. Williams, Thomas D. (2019, Mar. 20). “Twelve French Churches Attacked, Vandalized in One Week”. Breitbart.
6. Lough, Richard; Pineau, Elizabeth (2019, Apr. 16). “No sign of arson in Notre-Dame blaze as nation grieves for symbol”. Reuters.
7. Breeden, Aurelien; Peltier, Elian; Alderman, Liz; Pérez-Peña, Richard (2019, Apr. 16). “Notre-Dame Attic Was Known as 'the Forest'. And It Burned Like One”. The New York Times.
8. Laudauro, Inti (2019, Apr. 17). “Paris firefighters got on Notre-Dame site in less than 10 minutes”. Reuters.
9. Bennhold, Katrin; Glanz, James (2019, Apr. 19). “Notre-Dame's Safety Planners Underestimated the Risk, With Devastating Results”. The New York Times.
10. “Decades of Neglect Threatened Notre Dame, Well Before It Burned”. The Wall Street Journal. 2019, Apr. 18.
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12. Berlinger, Joshua (2019, Apr. 16). “Why the Notre Dame fire was so hard to put out”. CNN.
13. Hinnant, Lori (2019, Apr. 17). “66 minutes: The frantic race to save Notre Dame”. AP News.
14. Price, S.R.F. (1986). Rituals and power: the Roman imperial cult in Asia Minor. Cambridge University Press. pp. 20, 204–5.
15. MacCormack, Sabine (1972). “Change and Continuity in Late Antiquity: the ceremony of 'Adventus'”. Historia, 21, 4, p. 721–52.
16. Fishwick, Duncan (1991). The Imperial Cult in the Latin West: Studies in the Ruler Cult of the Western Provinces of the Roman Empire, vol. 1. Brill Publishers. pp. 1, 6–20.
17. Ciccotta, Tom (2019, Apr. 17). “Harvard University Architecture Historian: Notre Dame Burning Down is 'Act of Liberation'”. Breitbart.
18. Hassan, Jennifer (2019, Apr. 15). “With Notre Dame aflame, witnesses sing 'Ave Maria' in the streets of Paris”. Washington Post.
19. “Being Christian in Western Europe” (2018, May 29). Pew Research Center.
20. Z. Harlan, Chico (2019, Apr. 17). “Notre Dame fire came at a difficult time for French Catholics”. Washington Post.
21. Hoffner, Anne-Bénédicte; Vaillant, Gauthier (2017, Aug. 1). “The Sociology of French Catholics”. La Croix International.
22. Bullivant, Stephen (Mar. 2018). Europe’s Young Adults and Religion: Findings from the European Social Survey (2014-16) to inform the 2018 Synod of Bishops. Benedict XVI Centre for Religion and Society, St. Mary's University. Twickenham, London, UK.
23. Harlitz-Kern, Erika (2019, Apr. 19). “Give Notre Dame a Modern Roof the Alt-Right Will Hate”. The Daily Beast.
24. “France announces contest to redesign Notre Dame spire”. The Guardian. 2019, Apr. 17.
25. “Millions for Notre Dame – but nothing for us, say gilets jaunes”. The Guardian. 2019, Apr. 20.
26. James, Liam (2019, Apr. 27). “Greenhouse proposed to replace Notre Dame roof”. Independent.co.uk.
27. Montgomery, Jack (2019, Apr. 20). “Here Come the Architects: Modernists Want Glass Roof, Steel Spire, or Minaret for Notre Dame”. Breitbart.