Notre Dame de Paris

After the fire was extinguished at Notre Dame cathedral, I was grateful to read that no one had died. And that, despite the destruction of the roof and spire, so much of this symbolic building and its irreplaceable art had been saved. People were praying in the streets, showing how much this church means to Paris and to the world.

Ever since donations started pouring in, though, I have been hearing variations on this comment in person, on the news, and across social media:

It’s definitely food for thought. Nobody seems to be saying Notre Dame shouldn’t be saved, but everybody has an idea of where billionaires’ donations could be better used: the Flint water crisis, the Grenfell Tower fire, indeed any disaster where people have died. The point is that donations in these numbers weren’t and aren’t being made to these other causes.

I have another perspective on this. I think we are all acting exactly as our forebears did, in the centuries when Notre Dame was originally built.

Cathedrals were constructed to the glory of God at a time when that was a real conviction. Modern people have lost the vision to build something like Notre Dame over hundreds of years, as Heinrich Heine wrote in 1837: "People in those old times had convictions; we moderns only have opinions. And it needs more than a mere opinion to erect a Gothic cathedral."

In the Middle Ages, as in modern times, the poor suffered; and most people were poor. Unimaginable wealth poured into the construction of great cathedrals, while generations of laborers lived in serf-like conditions. In that sense, humanity’s greatest buildings are also monuments to inequality, from a time when equality was not even imagined.

And it’s not at all clear that Our Lord would even approve. On the BBC, Today host John Humphrys, who normally thinks the less Jesus on the radio the better, asked his guest, the Archbishop of York, whether Jesus was really interested in grand buildings. The answer should be clear from the Bible. Not only Jesus, but God in the Old Testament, repeatedly states that human hearts and behaviour are more important than constructing a temple to his name.

And yet—and yet—

As has been said often over recent days, a cathedral like Notre Dame means so much to so many people. It is, and was built as, a house of worship, and the people of Paris gathered and sang “Ave Maria” while it burned. Yet it has also accrued other meanings over the centuries. It stood through the French Revolution and the Nazi occupation of Paris. It stands for something French as well as something Catholic. And for many people all over the world, Notre Dame was and is a priceless heritage of humanity, the like of which can never be replaced.

When we look at the suffering that could be addressed, but isn’t, we wonder why all this money couldn’t be found for those disasters. Do rich people not care about anything unless it’s an opportunity to get their name out there? Is it the fault of a tax system that takes too little money from the rich, and so doesn’t leave enough revenue to help the poor? 

I think that’s a good question. But the fact remains: Without massive resources being devoted to building a cathedral, rather than helping poor people, Notre Dame would never have been built at all.

Few of humanity’s treasures come from a time of equality. Works of art are the products of patronage. Books are written, as Virginia Woolf pointed out, when a writer has leisure time: “a room of one’s own.” As a species, we have always had a large proportion of poor people and a few who were very rich; but we would also be poorer as a species were it not for many of these creations.

Those of us who have visited Notre Dame have had the privilege of appreciating a priceless work of art. We can appreciate that people in the past had the capacity to build something that would outlast them, and that would inspire many generations after them. The symbolic meaning of Notre Dame has attracted these record-breaking donations, but I understand why people are uncomfortable with them. These amounts simply haven’t been offered for other disasters, including those in which thousands have died. 

When pressed about this, the archbishop, John Sentamu, said, “There is enough food in the world to feed everybody, but not enough for our individual greed.” He is correct. If as humanity we got better at sharing the wealth, there is no reason that we could not both restore Notre Dame, to the glory of God, and help our neighbour.

Humankind is always struggling for this balance: the useful and the beautiful. The extravagant waste of expensive ointment offered to Jesus, who responded, “The poor you always have with you.” Notre Dame is an opportunity to bring people together around something beautiful, and not just rich people. Or, it’s an opportunity to question their motivations, because we think they should be doing something else.

Disasters bring out the best in humanity. If we squash this impulse to beauty, because we can think of more useful ways for money to be spent, will we get usefulness instead of beauty? I fear we will get neither.