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Virtues Laid Stone-by-Stone
The media flows with genuine tears over the catastrophic fire at Paris’ Notre Dame Cathedral. Historians would be quick to point out that such awful fires have occurred with dismaying regularity across the centuries. The difference here was the possibility of limiting the damage through modern firefighting equipment, plus the fact that technology allowed the entire world to learn about the tragedy within minutes.
Since Monday’s blaze, commentators across the world are the hailing this remarkable 850-year-old cathedral as a “Treasure of our Western Culture” or “A Landmark of our Western Civilization.” All true, of course. All true.
But what an awful thing to have to witness for these obvious words of praise to emanate from our news outlets. How rarely these days do we hear acknowledgments of the value of our Western Culture? On the contrary, the degradation of our Western values and achievements has become a full-time occupation of most media outlets, not to mention the academic community. Every “de,” “dis,” and “un” available in a language is regularly employed to denigrate, disparage, and unseat our Western heritage.
Caspar David Friedrich (1803)
What has fueled this somber turn of events? The residue of the disasters created by my generation in the 1960s, institutionalized educational theories of relativism, progressivism, and just plain laziness at learning the treasures bequeathed to us by the Ancient poets, philosophers, mathematicians, architects, and artists.
The values and virtues laid down, stone-by-stone, in the Cathedral of Notre Dame (as well as in monuments across our Western Civilization) are under threat—not just from fire, but from disdain and degradation. The ignorance behind these attacks is staggering.
Now, after this tragic blaze, we hear the unaccustomed sound of paeans of admiration sung for the architecture and art contained within Notre Dame, even as many of these same voices ignore the spiritual purpose of the edifice and the theological significance of each bit of glass, bronze, and stone. Perhaps they genuinely don’t know.
Perhaps, just perhaps, this awful blaze in Paris will remind us how fragile a heritage really is. Even a single generation of neglect can weaken it.
Our heritage is not just being neglected: it is under attack as much as those centuries-old rafters that burned so rapidly in Notre Dame’s roof. Each of us who is occupied with teaching the riches passed down from our forefathers serves as a tiny sprinkler, poised to douse the all-consuming flames. We are firefighters, working together against obstacles unimaginable even two decades ago. Our burden is made lighter by each other’s effort.
May the Cathedral of Notre Dame be renewed, the glorious spire be rebuilt, and new fire safeguards put into place to protect the cathedral. God bless those who provide the enormous financial means needed, as well as the intricate skill required. And may each child once again be raised to love Beauty, identify Goodness, and pursue Virtue, standing strong to renew and protect the structure of Western Civilization.
Published in Religion & Philosophy
I saw on Lucianne. Com a clip of someone on the roof after all the workers had left and then a bright flash. Hurry to see it before it’s taken down.
Notre Dame Cathedral is gone. They should not rebuild. They can not rebuild. For whatever they built would be a golem. A replica of the original with no soul or heart. Notre Dame Cathedral Is dead, leave it in peace.
@professorcarol, thank you for this most thought provoking, and entirely accurate, portrayal of the tragedy of the damage the media and, with respect, the academy have deliberately set out to inflict upon our Western Heritage. Thank you.
@phcheese, I also saw that video; does anyone seriously think we, the great unwashed, will ever be told what really caused this catastrophe? I note that even some of the “conservatives” on Fox News like Shep Smith are refusing to allow guests on their show to even mention the fact that there have been 875 churches either totally or partially destroyed in attacks by members of “the Religion of Love”; I dislike obsessive conspiracy mongers as much as anyone, but how is it anything but out-of-control PC mania to not even be allowed to suggest that the beautiful cathedral might have been #876? By the way, if Shep Smith is a conservative, I’m an astronaut.
@fakejohnjanegaltjohn/fake, I heard a commentator on Rush — I think but am not certain that it was Victor Davis Hanson, for whom I have enormous respect — make a similar point. I happen to disagree, as the process of rebuilding itself might bring at least some of the secularists back to a realization of the immeasurable importance of a renewal, a Renaissance, as it were, of the respect for and the study of Western Civilization and our heritage. I’m not all that optimistic that it will happen, but I dread the deadly effect this will have on that respect and study of our mutual heritage if at least some effort is not made to breathe new life into this priceless treasure.
Thanks again, Professor Carol, for this fine post.
Sincerely, Jim
Notre Dame is not a landmark of Western Civilization. It is a landmark of Christendom. I don’t mean to be critical of you, Carol, but I am beginning to see that the term “Western Civilization” is Newspeak.
I’ve also been seeing, more and more, what seems to me to be a strange blindness on the part of secular conservatives. They generally value history and tradition, but are utterly incapable of seeing the true foundation of our civilization. It is strange. Douglas Murray is an exception, and perhaps Jordan Peterson.
I do like this internet meme for the remnant of Christendom:
Beautiful post. I agree completely that the greatest threat to “Western Civilization” is not from accident or the elements, but the efforts of the left and its media lackeys to burrow under the foundation of Judeo-Christian religious tradition and the wonderful things that have resulted therefrom.
As to rebuilding, I hope they do, but that they attempt, to the extent possible, to replicate what it was, as opposed to re-creating it as some sort of secular, politically-correct symbol.
Notre Dame is a church, and it should continue to be one.
Western Civilization was the source of all evil last week, and it will be again next week.
This post sums up what so many have felt seeing the destruction at Notre Dame this week. So well said. We are essentially as Christians, spiritual firefighters, and the 5 alarm fire is still ringing…
Regrettably, part of that culture includes anti-Semitism, represented by two sculptures embedded in an outer wall of the Notre Dame cathedral.
These two sculptures, Synagoga and Ecclesia (synagogue and church), were popular figures in the Middle Ages, found in art and sculpted into Church walls, meant to represent Christianity’s supposed vanquishing of Judaism. Ecclesia is shown erect and triumphant, bearing a cross; Synagoga is usually blindfolded and dejected, a snake wrapped around her head, bearing a broken staff with the 10 commandments slipping from her hand.
It would be a nice gesture if these figures could be removed to a museum as an historical artifact rather than continue to adorn a church since today Judaism and Christianity are closer than ever before, especially due to their common struggle against Islam.
and replaced by an apology.
Notre Dame is revered – however temporarily – because was moved by croupier’s rake into the category of Art, which replaced the God that died in the trenches of WW1. At least in the minds of the enlightened. Its philosophical underpinnings are important only in the sense that the symbolism in a Renaissance painting is important; they’re a key to understanding the meaning of the art, not the essence of the belief behind it. I wouldn’t be surprised if most Parisians felt a strange guilty ache when contemplating the cost to a society of general disbelief, but few would be motivated to change what they thought. Religion is a stubborn, immovable impediment to self-regard.
Those of us on this side of the debate know this. It seems unlikely that the lesson will be taken to heart by people who regard Western Civ as a malevolence best dissolved in a solution of multiculturalism. For them, history is an idiot. Heritage is shame.
I’d prefer they stayed up, because that was who they were. Why pretend otherwise? It’s like purging the newspaper archives of the anti-Dreyfus cartoons. Praise where praise is due, and all the contemporary sins unmuted.
That cutout for Illinois goes too far south. Way too far. Like anything further south than 159th Street is going to be at best contested, and the folks in Jesusland have all the guns.
Agreed. One can’t fix history by erasing it.
Fully agree with Professor Carol. I would just add one thing:
All nation-states are bound together with a common faith. This is as vital for the US as the Anglican Church in GB and the Catholic Church in France.
Do not ever let the phrases In God We Trust and One Nation Under God be deleted from their respective contexts. The day those words disappear, the United States will cease to exist.
I can see the argument for leaving them for historical purposes, but there’s an argument for taking them down just because they’re bad theology.
We (RC) are taught that Christianity is the fulfillment of the Abrahamic covenant — a worldwide blessing, not the conquest of Judaism. These figures are just so… medieval in that sense. A primitive misunderstanding.
But, I’m undecided on whether Notre Dame should be rebuilt either way. I fear the West is in such a state of nihilism and depravity, it will just become a temple of secular self-indulgence or, worse, a mosque. Maybe it’s best to leave it a ruin — the Christian West’s Ozymandias.
In this regard, I find reason for some opposition to your disagreement in this post yesterday on FB, with an awful lot of people amongst my friends and acquaintances endorsing (to my very great surprise and disappointment): “…the fact that billionaires have, in just 24 hours, pledged $600 bn to restore it puts into perspective how easily rich people could solve world issues if they cared.”
Ideally, the French would be so reviled by these figures that they would demand their removal from the public square since “That’s no longer who we are.” Put them in a museum, within historical context, explaining in adjoining text that while Notre Dame was being constructed, there was a bonfire in a nearby public square where 10,000 Talmuds were burned and, not too long after that, Jews were expelled from France.
If these figures remain where they are, at least affix a plaque alongside them explaining that the attitude they represent is dangerous and where it can lead.
Unfortunately, Californians are moving to Nevada and Arizona, already turning those states purple, if not yet totally blue.
And Colorado. We call it “New California” around here. And we have “the first openly gay governor,” which no one knew (or cared about his sexuality) until about two minutes after the election results were announced. But, now we can vote for the first openly gay president I suppose. Lefties love their identity politics.
I disagree. It needs to be taken out and put in a room of shame somewhere in the cathedral.
I agree that it should not be discarded, that it’s an important reminder of our sins and it’s important for the sake of history.
But to leave it there, it will continue to work its evil.
Thank you, MarciN. Evil images should not be allowed to remain in place and (better yet, as you suggest, should be relocated) without accompanying acknowledgement of the attitude — and the attendant destructive consequences — that they promote.
Build a wall and make California pay for it.
I have a serious problem with the moral relativism we live in today, one that equates all atrocities with the Holocaust. I read a powerful piece in the Atlantic Monthly about twenty years ago, one I haven’t been able to find again in their archives, which, after I dealt with being made physically sick by it, ended forever for me the notion that what the Nazis did was like anything human beings had ever done to each other. The article was written to those who were saying at the time, “Why don’t they just get over it?” and “Lots of groups of suffered. Why is the Holocaust any different?” I remember the concluding paragraph only, in which the author said, “It was the coldness with which it was done.”
I cannot explain the Holocaust, but I do know one thing: the evil that made it happen still walks the earth. The fact that every single day somewhere Moslems are openly and publicly praying for the destruction of Jews while the world watches silently tells me all I need to know about my fellow human beings.
This is not our past. It remains our present. It remains a threat. We need to address it openly without sensationalizing it so as to encourage it.
To leave those plaques there is giving some sort of permission, some sort of validation, to attitudes that are destructive, and possibly full-blown evil. Leaving them up is one more incident of putting the Holocaust in a basket with other human atrocities and sins when this one must be placed in its own basket.
Yes, what a concept!
If Catholic theologians want to remove statues because they want to make public statements about how their understanding of theology has changed that is their business. Except in this case it isn’t since the French Government took possession of the church properties about 50 years ago, another subject. However, washing history of things abhorrent to us today deprives us of learning good lessons from history. We should learn from both the good and the bad, else we are under educated.
Agreed. The problem with this particular instance is it gives fodder to both the Jew-haters and the Christian-haters. I don’t have a good solution. The ruin of Notre Dame is part of history now, too.