The
mourning for Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris began even as the flames were
burning. The reaction of Mr Rod Dreher
is representative of what many in the West are thinking and feeling about this
event:
There is no way to replace
what Paris, what France, what Christendom, and indeed what humanity, has lost
today. It is irreplaceable. For example, we literally cannot recreate the
windows, which date from the time of Dante. We do not know how to do it. As a
friend said to me, “You can rebuild the World Trade Center. You cannot rebuild
Notre Dame de Paris.”
. . .
What
we lost today is one of the great embodiments of Western civilization. It is
impossible to overstate what this means. It will take some time to absorb.
Notre Dame de Paris is at the heart of France’s identity. All distances in
France are measured from kilometre
zéro, in front of the cathedral. Though most (but not all!) of the
French have turned away from their baptism, Notre Dame is the symbolic heart of
the nation. And now, it’s gone, though firefighters may have saved its bones.
It took 200 years to build, and now it was made a holocaust in one terrible
afternoon.
Like
James Poulos above, I cannot see this as anything other than a sign. The only
church in all of Western civilization more important than Notre Dame de Paris
is St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. The consuming fire is likely to have been
started from a construction accident. I hope that is the case; if this was
terrorism, then France is in for unimaginable spasms of violence. Nevertheless,
if this was an accident, it still symbolizes what we in the West have allowed
to happen to our religious and cultural patrimony. What happened in Paris today
has been happening across our civilization.
It
happens whenever we fail to live out our baptism, and fail to baptize our
children. It happens by omission, by indifference, and it happens by
commission, from spite. It happens in classrooms, in newsrooms, in shopping
malls, in poisoned seminaries and defiled sacristies, and everywhere the truths
that Notre Dame de Paris embodied are ridiculed, flayed, and destroyed in the
hearts and minds of modern men. The fire that destroyed Paris’s iconic
cathedral made manifest what we in the West have been doing to ourselves for
over 200 years.
This
catastrophe in Paris today is a sign to all of us Christians, and a sign to all
people in the West, especially those who despise the civilization that built
this great temple to its God on an island in the Seine where religious rites
have been celebrated since the days of pagan Rome. It is a sign of what we are
losing, and what we will not recover, if we don’t change course now.
. . .
The
flames of Notre Dame de Paris are a call to repentance and conversion. As the
monks of Norcia have been doing since their church met catastrophe, so let us
all do as we mourn the loss of one of Christendom’s greatest cathedrals. There
can be no greater tribute to what this holy and revered temple meant to its
builders and to all those faithful who worshiped beneath its vaults all these
centuries than to turn, in sackcloth and ashes, back to God, and to raise again
the vaults of His sanctuaries in our hearts and families and communities —
while there is still time.
For
you in the West who are not religious, I hope you will reflect on what this
cathedral meant in artistic, architectural, and cultural terms, and that you
will think hard about what we are losing as we collectively repudiate our
patrimony.
If
you were waiting for a sign of the times, this is it.
. . .
We
do not wish to seem callous to those who are mourning the burning of Notre Dame
Cathedral, and we are not trying to be.
However, we would like to view this event from a different
perspective.
From
the view of the Orthodox Church, the West left Christendom in 1054 A. D. at the
time of the Great Schism. The culture
that grew up after that time in the West, including her architecture,
necessarily reflects the new religious underpinning. Christos Yannaras explains how this worked
itself out in the giant cathedrals of Western Europe in his book The Freedom of Morality:
“Gothic art,”
observes Choisy, “operates with antitheses, contrasting with the plains the
elevation of its perpendicular lines and enormous spires.” What we have here is
not simply an aesthetic or proportional contrast, however, but an
anthropocentric tendency, a demand for the earthly to be elevated to the
transcendent. The union of created and uncreated is not here regarded as a personal
event, as the transformation of man, the world and history in the person of
God the Word incarnate. It is an encounter between two natures, with
human nature clothed in the dignity and transcendent majesty of the divine
nature— which is exactly what happens with papal primacy and infallibility, and
with the totalitarian centralization of the Roman Catholic Church. “The vaulted
construction of a Gothic church desires, and tends, to give the impression of a
monolithic framework” — it is the image that the Roman Catholic West has of the
Church. Approaching the divine presupposes in this context a comparison between
human smallness and the grandeur of divine authority an authority tangibly
expressed by its monolithic, unified and majestic organization and its
administrative structure. The Church is not the world in the dimension of the
Kingdom, the harmonization of the inner principles of created things with the
affirmation of human freedom in Christ’s assumption of worldly flesh; but it is
the visible, concrete potentiality for the individual to submit to divine
authority. This is why in a Gothic church the material is not “saved,” it is
not “made word” and it is not “transfigured”: it is subdued by a superior
force. To use specialized terminology once again: “The supports prevail over
the weight placed on them… the vaulting with its supple formation clearly shows
that it concentrates there all the action in the forces, and compels matter to
rise up to the heights.” This compulsion of matter in Gothic
architecture represents a technology which leads straight to contemporary
technocracy.
--Gothic Cathedral in
Rouen, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gothic_architecture
. . .
“It was nevertheless
the art of the Gothic cathedrals which, in the whole of Christendom, then
became the instrument— perhaps the most effective one— of Catholic repression”:
Duby, L’Europe des Cathidrales, p. 72. Direct experience alone
can justify and verify these conclusions. In the cathedrals of Cologne, Milan
or Ulm, and other European cities, anyone with experience of the theology and
art of the Eastern Church can see the justification for the “rebellion” of the
Reformation and for the various ways in which man revolts against this
transcendent authority which is expressed with such genius in architecture: it
is an authority which humiliates and degrades human personhood and even
ultimately destroys it. Revolt is inevitable against such a God, who consents
to encounter man on a scale of such crushing difference in size.
--Notre Dame
Cathedral, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gothic_architecture
Blessed
Father Seraphim Rose explores this change in art/architecture in the West
further:
And finally he [Hans
Sedlmayr--W.G.] gives a sort of summation of all these destructive, dark influences
as they have been in the history of Western art. And although he himself was a
lover of art before the Revolution, that is, up to the eighteenth century, in
this little history of his, he shows very well that these destructive
influences go right back precisely to the moment where we discussed the
beginning of the apostasy, that is, the twelfth century.
The first outburst of this
demonic elements, he says, occurs in the late Romanesque. “It is in this phase
that the sacred world is suddenly endowed to a quite terrifying degree with a
demoniac character. Thus in the doorways” of various cathedrals, “the sacred
figures have the appearances of corpses and of ghosts, a thing that can in no
wise be explained by a certain remoteness from humanity that marks the art of
the high Middle Ages. Christ sometimes resembles an Asiatic idol or an Asiatic
despot. The Apocalyptic beasts and the angels are all distorted by this
demoniac quality. This curious phenomenon cannot be explained in terms of the
dual intention that is discernable in much medieval art, the intention to
administer a certain awful shock to the beholder and at the same time, by means
of the sheer absurdity of the visible symbols [it created], to spur his mind
towards purely spiritual contemplation; for directly beside the sacred figures,
and in the very midst of them, and indeed scarcely distinguishable from them at
all, are images of demons and of demoniac beasts and chimaeras that even invade
the interior of the church.
“At the same time the figures
themselves begin to acquire a most remarkable and unprecedented quality of
instability. Those on the great arch above the door” of the Cathedral “at
Vezelay seem positively to be tottering, and look as though they might crash
down at any moment from the great curve on which they have so precarious a
footing. This is the period when figures begin to be tangentially affixed to
the frames of the great doors, and it is to this period that belongs the great
Wheel of Fortune that lifts a man up and [ineluctably] casts him down, and it
is this period also that for the very first time stands architectural forms
upon their heads.
“All this is the visible
expression of [that volubilitas rerum,] that instability of human
affairs, that people have suddenly begun to feel with a peculiar and painful
intensity. It is in fact the visible symbol for the dominant mood, the dominant
feeling about life and the world.
“In religion the dominant
emotion is fear, the principal theme is the Day of Judgment, expressed to the
uttermost potential of all the terror that it can inspire. In the crypt-like
gloom of the church we can with our mind’s eye see the faithful
standing ‘in fear and trembling before God.’ Never has the [mysterium
tremendum]” tremendous mystery “attained such force over men’s minds.”cccxxii
So, already for some
reason art begins to become unstable. Although the main Gothic tradition goes
on with its great cathedrals, still he senses here some kind of instability.
Why? Because they, at that time they began to realize that they had lost
Orthodoxy. And the artist is more sensitive than other people. This begins to
come out in him. And when Orthodoxy is lost, the demons begin to come in. And
therefore the demons directly inspire the artists.
Then there’s a second period, which
is that of Hieronymus Bosch. “In the Romanesque” period “the demoniac world had
really not yet achieved a separate life of its own. It is only in the Gothic
that light and darkness are divided and the cathedral indirectly brings into
being as” its “polar opposite to the Heavenly Kingdom, which is shown forth in
itself, a Kingdom of Hell,” even “though this [last] remains [essentially]”
still “a subordinate thing. [Then]” Thus “as the representational art of the
late Middle Ages develops, we begin to get painted representations of Hell. The
culminating point of this development is to be found in Hieronymus Bosch who
flourished [between 1480 and 1516.]” around 1500.
“Bosch, a contemporary
[and actual co-eval] of Leonardo da Vinci, created the world of Hell as a kind
of chaotic counterpart to the new cosmic art of the High Renaissance,” which we
already saw, this idealistic, chiliastic painting, “and what is entirely new
about Bosch’s infernal world is that it has its own creative
principles, its own chaotic ‘structure,’ its own formal laws, and it is really
these that make it into a true counterworld to the worlds of Heaven and earth.
It is only since Bosch that we have anything like a picture of Hell made
visible.
“There is definite novelty
in the very shapes of these creatures from Hell. They are not ‘fallen children
of men, who by a simple process of metamorphosis have been turned into beasts
of the Devil,’ but” they are “wholly independent and as
yet unknown forms of life, born of the marriage of every conceivable kind of
creature, fish, beast, bird, witch and mandrake, the products of a kind of
ungoverned cosmic lewdness and debauchery, in which even lifeless things can
mingle with the living. All this was something that lay wholly outside the
horizons of antiquity.
“New also is the actual
scenery of Hell, and we see aspects of the face of this earth which had never
before been put on canvas. We see here dark gulfs, empty stretches of earth and
sea that seem to tell us how utterly God has forsaken them, the desolation of
empty cities, strange hideous places whose vegetation are gallows-trees and
wheels of torture, slime and morass. Here are neither sun nor moon, such light
as there is comes from vast conflagrations or from the irridescence of strange
phosphorescent shapes. Hell can show us the work of human hands, but it is
distorted, arid in decay. Above all we see ruins, we see them continually --
and in Hell there are also arsenals, a fighting equipment of strange machines,
pieces of apparatus that are often meaningless, though sometimes they have a
meaning, being instruments of torture, while through the air sail airships,
demon manned and demon piloted.”cccxxiii
. . .
--Orthodox Survival Course, http://tinyurl.com/gncvke7, pgs. 114-5
Considering
the foregoing, what is it that we really see in Notre Dame Cathedral? In essence, one of the crowning symbols of
the apostasy of the West. Its
post-Schism art as we have seen is an art of the Fall, with all its death,
decay, and confusion. With the arts in
the Orthodox Church we see something very different, an art of the
Resurrection, of the transfiguration of man and the world in Christ:
. . .
The
rest is at https://www.geopolitica.ru/en/article/rebuilding-notre-dame-cathedral-and-western-culture .
The
editors chose not to include the pictures that were included with the essay,
which is why there are some seemingly random words and page addresses scattered
about. To see the pictures, follow the
paths below. You should be able to match
them up with their appropriate places in the essay pretty easily:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c0/Notre_Dame_de_Paris_DSC_0846w.jpg/149px-Notre_Dame_de_Paris_DSC_0846w.jpg
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/3d/Notre-Dame_de_Rouen%2C_Nave_20140521_1.jpg/273px-Notre-Dame_de_Rouen%2C_Nave_20140521_1.jpg
http://www.orthodoxprayer.org/Divine_Liturgy/Images/Dome.jpg
http://www.orthodoxprayer.org/Divine_Liturgy/Images/OrthodoxChruch.jpg
http://www.symeon-anthony.info/pilgrimage/churchTypes-Thumbnails/1.jpg
--
Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England,
South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð,
unworthy though we are!
Anathema to the Union!
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