Notre Dame Cathedral: A Monument of Beauty and Faith

Notre Dame guarding the Seine River

Introduction

Would you and I be willing to take part in a building project that would never be finished in our lifetime? Notre Dame de Paris, the most famous and iconic Gothic cathedral in the world, took over 200 years to build and yet faced the threat of total destruction in 2019 from a fire that took 15 hours to quench. We cannot assume that saving this cathedral would have been a priority even two hundred years ago. On the contrary, this massive monument to beauty and faith risked being torn down as a result of its dilapidation. In fact, were it not for Victor Hugo's world-famous classic, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, published in 1831, we most likely would not have mourned the cathedral's near demise on April 15-16, 2019. How this Gothic novel saved a then-600-year-old legacy and engraved it once again on the Parisian conscience deserves its own focus, but the question of the cathedral's survival remains, despite its total restoration and rededication in December of 2024.

By "survival," we are not speaking merely of the edifice itself but of the mindset that brought it into being. If ever there were a symbol of what the "Old World" valued, it is Notre Dame de Paris. The spirit of postmodernity that treats worship as a fast-food, "have-it-your-way" convenience perpetuates a spirit of arrogance foreign to the medieval world. And this isn't a spirit unique to ardent atheists, secular humanists, or political activists. The evangelical world and the "woke" culture it has often embraced tend far too often to disdain, to discredit, and even to dread physical beauty that we assume has come at the expense of human pain and even human life.

Many of us believe without tangible justification that beauty is a contradiction of goodness but that it symbolizes, instead, human ugliness and exploitation. Our contempt for beauty as a product of too much work makes one wonder if Notre Dame de Paris would have been saved in the infamous riots of 2020 that swept the free world. Property damage in 102 countries involving not only hundreds of cathedrals but even countless Jewish cemeteries speaks to a derangement difficult even to describe.

The day of the Crystal Cathedral is gone, thanks in large part to the Seeker Sensitive Movement during the 1980s-2000s that stripped churches of the unique symbols of their faith. Because worship centers have become largely utilitarian, many of us simply have never even stepped foot into a soaring monolith of beauty and faith.

In our ignorance, therefore, we tend to project a grievance onto past ages that they did not feel and would not own. We do not understand the worldview of the cathedrals or how much they were loved as peasants' fullhearted devotion to their God. Their God had to be as big as the Black Death that loomed over them, as vast as the inky star-studded sky, as beautiful as the sunset, and as breathtaking as the dawn of a new day. Their God had to be beautiful because their lives were so painful. Does this mean that our houses of worship do not have to be beautiful because our lives are so easy?

We may mistake our disgust for sacred beauty for a justifiable disdain for paganism or pageantry, but these are not synonymous. Nor is a defense of dignified and reverent worship an appeal for ecumenism. Far from it. It is a cry for the restoration of beauty and reverence that began in the Garden of Eden as Adam and Eve walked with God in a perfect Paradise. Who can read the Creation Hymn without wondering what this first cathedral--this holy sanctuary of trees and flowers and birds--looked, sounded, and smelled like? People have become bored with God today because they have dragged Him from the heavens to the stage by transforming worship into entertainment. Rather than pointing to God, worship points to our own "experience." But there is only so much "sensation" the mind can endure without satiety.

Church isn't church for us today because God isn't God. We have redefined Him in terms of our own laziness, convenience, and complacency. There is no "work" of any kind for most of us in "worship" today; people have become spectators listening to a praise band perform songs that are not generally singable. The fact that Notre Dame de Paris has survived 863 years stands as a rebuke to consumerism that handles God's Word as a menu. The story of Notre Dame Cathedral serves as more than a monument to beauty and faith; it is a mandate to a full and repentant restoration of reverence for God Himself--the God who is bigger than artificial intelligence, nuclear arsenals, global pandemics, and technological omnipresence.

Story of an Ethos: The Backstory of Notre Dame de Paris

Ignorance of history would have us forget that the site of Notre Dame de Paris was itself once rooted in paganism. Bishop Maurice de Sully laid the cornerstone of the cathedral in 1163 with Pope Alexander III as witness. Choosing this site as a reclamation from the worship of the Roman god Jupiter proved the rhetorical impetus for what would become a monumental witness to the Christian faith. Think of it! This witness spans nearly half the two millennia since the ascension of Christ! Far from a prideful endorsement of pomp and pageantry, the bishop's vision to dedicate the Île de la Cité as the "heart" of Paris was a bold statement of faith. This site, today layered in 863 years of history, became in a single day the epicenter of a centuries-long quest to bring the worship of the one true God, the Lord of Hosts, to Europe.

What was the European world even like in the 12th century? British history buffs might love looking back to the time of Henry II, the notorious king of England who by 1170 would inadvertently order the assassination of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Becket--also his one-time Chancellor and trusted personal friend. The struggle between church and state that characterized England found reprieve in Europe. While feudalism ruled the day, with nation states dotting the European landscape like counties in Texas today, the little stone church was the center of every feudal state. The Crusades also occupied the religious consciousness of millions of soldiers of the Cross, and spiritual fervor grew virtually from the soil itself. With 90% of the population defined as peasants whose next meal remained but a prayer, the broadscale appeal to spiritual nobility met with open hearts, if not hungry mouths. Those hired to labor for the Lord found pride in doing so, and the cost was shunned for the crown.

Nor was ignorance applauded amid poverty and deprivation. On the contrary, the 12th century Renaissance brought the birth of Europe's first universities in cities such as Bologna and Paris. Learning, if not literacy, characterized a new mindset of the European people. It was an amazing time to be alive and a still more worthy time to give one's life.

A Living Logos: The Gothic Framework of Notre Dame Cathedral

With Europe as a new center of geometry and logic, no one looked to fallen angels or terrestrial aliens to erect pyramids for reasons that would remain forever inscrutable. The objective was clear: a cathedral worthy of God must soar to the heavens to honor the God who created all. By design, the cathedral was intended to dwarf every building on the Parisian landscape. Completed, this monument to beauty and faith would stretch 420 feet long. That means roughly 12 standard NBA basketball courts could fit inside. The width of 157 feet across the transept created the shape of the cross--a blueprint that would become standard for Gothic cathedral construction in the centuries to come. Talk about larger than life--with a sanctuary measuring nearly 60,000 square feet, the common peasant would feel like a sparrow nesting on God's altar. The eastward-facing cruciform floor plan meant also that the sun would intersect the altar in crossbeams of light that proved an obvious parable to faith. I have seen this phenomenon in person at 10:00 of a gorgeous August morning in Cologne Cathedral. The common man may not have been able to pick up a Bible and read, but he could look up and see His Father's smile in the beauty that could only remind him of his home in heaven one day.

Not a hyperbole, this fact was borne out in the intent to create stained glass windows that foreshadowed the light of the Heavenly City as described in Revelation 21:10-21. The logical construction of these windows pointed of necessity to God as the Mighty Architect of their geometry. Those peeks into heaven's glory, totaling 113 depictions of Bible stories and miracles, not only allowed light to penetrate the stone interior; they brought color to the drab lives of impoverished people. The famous Rose windows became arguably the single-most important feature by which Notre Dame is defined. And exactly here is where the miracle of Gothic architecture makes its entrance. Without the ribbed vaults and flying buttresses that have become synonymous with this subsequently controversial style, the light within this massive cathedral would have grown dim and dingy. That this gloom did not happen presents a marvel in itself, for castle-chasers today often find them strangely disappointing when they tour the insides.

But Notre Dame Cathedral only grew lovelier and more impressive over the four stages of its 182-year construction. From the choir (1163-1182) to the nave (1182-1200) to the façade and towers (1200-1225) to the final flourish (1225-1345), this monument to beauty and faith became the testament to both the supernatural and the technological that Bishop Sully had first envisioned. How did medieval artisans build celestial-bent towers that reached 226 feet above the foundation? And when the restoration of the 1800s prompted by Victor Hugo restored the dilapidated original spire while adding an additional 315 feet, the Bishop's vision that Notre Dame Cathedral would rule the skyline proved more than a dream; it had become a perennial reality. This was perhaps the world's first "megachurch," holding from 6,000 to 9,000 worshippers. Imagine the sounds of such a full-throated congregation amid those vaulted interiors in singing a doxology today!

But, tragically, it would be false to pretend that lives were not lost in the cathedral's construction--a precedent that had no doubt been set in the building of Solomon's Temple. And yet, if devotion and adrenaline are the prerequisites for courage, the medieval artisan became the world's foremost heroic authority on faith and endurance. Defying the law of gravity to set even one massive stone in place required more than physical strength; it required spiritual stamina such as the world has not since seen. These artisans used the treadwheel crane, sometimes called the "human hamster crane," to hoist massive stones weighing as much as 1,300 pounds apiece. Workers walked inside this wheel, sometimes as large as 26 feet in diameter, to generate the force required to wind a rope around an axle. Man and beast formed a chain of muscle power required to lift the stone to its height and the heart's hope to God. It would be no stretch of imagination whatsoever to believe that the cathedral's construction was literally bathed in prayer.

And what of the roof? The original roof with its intricate latticework was constructed from a literal forest estimating from 1,300 to 5,000 oak trees. Someone today would certainly complain about that! These trees, rightly known as "old growth" timber, likely dated back 300 to 400 years to the 8th or 9th centuries. If trees could talk, that would mean that they would have peered down on the likes of Charlemagne, the dubbed "Father of Europe." The unification of church and state was not only alive and well; it defined Christianity to the then-known world. The Vikings were then toying with the fantasy of landing at Lindisfarne. In Central America, great Mayan cities had begun to decline, while, conversely, Islam was entering a golden age. In Asia, the Tang Dynasty was reaching its peak, and these trees that became Notre Dame Cathedral were struggling up through the soil.

And this was just one cathedral. Hundreds--some would say thousands--of Gothic cathedrals would be built all across Europe in the centuries to come. Although not the first, Notre Dame became the marvel of modern physics with its high-tech methods and ingenious brainpower. Among other techniques, it was the first to use iron staples to reinforce its massive stones. And as we have already seen, it utilized the grandest logic of engineering to create the flying buttresses as supports for the massive stone walls, so that they could then be pierced to allow light to pour into the sanctuary.

Unusual facts about Notre Dame de Paris abound, from the grand to the tiny. First among Catholics would be the belief that the cathedral housed the Crown of Thorns Christ wore on the Cross. While this claim seems like pure folklore, every cathedral was chosen to house an acclaimed and significant relic of the faith, making it also, therefore, a site of ongoing pilgrimage. The most indefensible and even humorous stories of this nature that I have read involve the head of John the Baptist. More than two cathedrals claim to have this relic, one which claims they have the head of John the Baptist as a young man, and the other, that they have his head as an old man. Oh, me! But the lore and legend need not detract from the truth.

The Grand Organ alone is reason enough of which to boast, were boasting in God's house allowed. The organ can trace its roots back 600 years, while the current organ dates back to 1868. With its 8,000 pipes--the largest measuring 32 feet tall, or the height of a three-story building--the organ alone is a monument to faith. Wouldn't you like to sound one note in tune on that grand masterpiece of engineering? At the largest opening, these pipes are wide enough for a small child to climb through, with a single pipe of this size weighing nearly one ton. Wouldn't you like to hear a call to worship on that great throat of glory? Now imagine a whole choir of the same! But the smallest of these pipes measures about the size of a pencil stub at about half an inch long. What a marvel of sound and sense this great instrument is!

But that's not the smallest fact about this grand cathedral. The smallest indeed is without a doubt the miracle of the bees that survived the 2019 fire. We should allow the bees to speak for themselves, but we absolutely must point out that Psalm 84 became a living reality in Notre Dame Cathedral, with this massive structure becoming the home to myriad uninvited, although welcome, wildlife. It stands to reason that, if Quasimodo is going to find bats in the belfry, he might find a lot else, too. The fact is, Notre Dame de Paris before the 2019 fire could have been accurately described as an urban ecosystem. More than a sparrow nested on God's altar. The cathedral had become home to species that could find no other favorable habitat in Paris. Peregrine falcons have inhabited the cathedral for over 200 years, while house sparrows, common kestrels, and pipistrelle bats had taken up cozy residence among the cathedral's crevices and stone towers before the fire. It would be no exaggeration to say that the cathedral became a sanctuary to God's creatures in a manner far beyond what Bishop Sully could have imagined.

A Powerful Pathos: Shaping and Surviving History

The cathedral doesn't become famous because of who steps inside; the person becomes famous who steps inside Notre Dame--or, at least, it is intriguing to think so, despite the countless masses that have trekked anonymous grooves into its stone floors. It is, after all, the little people of history who made Notre Dame great--but we will get to that. Should we spend time on Napoleon Bonaparte or King Louis IX or King Henry VI of England or Mary, Queen of Scots or Joan of Arc? What about Charles de Gaulle celebrating the cathedral's liberation from the Nazis? Or what about General Dietrich von Choltitz, the German military governor of Paris, who defied Hitler's maniacally enraged order to bring the city to ruins? Hitler's men had placed three tons of explosives inside the cathedral, to be triggered when the Allied Forces took the city in August of 1944. Von Choltitz, however, had other plans. Believing Hitler to be insane, he saved not only Notre Dame Cathedral that day; he saved also the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre. He never detonated the dynamite. Why? Even as a German enemy of France, he could see that he dare not go down in history as the one who destroyed such beauty.

And it seemed only poetic justice that the cathedral that survived the French Revolution should outlast Hitler also. The misguided freedom-lusters who attacked the cathedral for the decade of this insanity (1789-1799) did not know their right hand from their left, spiritually speaking, and sought not only to de-Christianize France but also to erase its religious history. A dose of the riots of 2020 can give us a clue as to the devastation they wrought on Notre Dame Cathedral, beheading 28 statues that turned out to be--not political oppressors or Kings of France--but, alas! the Biblical kings of Judah. Perhaps these were the original beauty-haters that saw freedom as antithetical to religious fealty. But once again, Notre Dame stood the test of time as if seeing into its own future a heavier hand than the world had ever known in the madness of Adolf Hitler.

And, of course, we have Victor Hugo--following the French Revolution but predating Hitler--who wrote The Hunchback of Notre Dame as not only a tribute to the cathedral but as a social protest to its imminent demolition. Because of the worldwide fame of this Gothic novel, not only was Notre Dame de Paris spared, it was given its iconic spire in 1859, replacing the original spire of the 1200s that had been removed in the late 18th century as structurally unstable. Measuring 59 feet taller than the original spire, this Viollet-le-Duc spire was constructed from a massive oak frame and was covered in 250 tons of lead. Imagine that falling down one day!

So the cathedral survived to enjoy another 160 years of admiration and celebration until tragedy struck in the form of a dropped cigarette on April 15, 2019. Ironically, the cathedral was already undergoing a massive restoration when this spark ignited into an inferno. Not a terrorist plot as the Christian world at first assumed, the greatest blow to Notre Dame's 856 years of beauty turned out to be a single act of completely avoidable human error. I wonder if the culprit knows who he is? And who would be smoking on site of such a renovation? But as if foreshadowing the apocalypse of Babylon falling in a day, Notre Dame's nearly nine-century strength and endurance was to reach its hottest adversity over the next 15 hours.  See live video footage: Notre Dame Cathedral was on fire.

The story of the alarm is amazing in itself. As a lone "watchman on the wall," the guard who received the security employee's call of "Fire!" could not find the fire. Misunderstanding the signal, he headed to the wrong attic, the sacristy, first. Giving the "all clear," he returned to his post, only to receive a second and more urgent warning. Disoriented, he turned around this time to climb the 300 steps to the main cathedral's attic where the massive fire was "hiding." Opening this door confirmed the worst: the fire that had taken hold for 30 minutes without the fire department being called was now a raging inferno. What a bitter counterpoint to the guard's first "all-clear" this lake of fire became! The blaze was so completely out of control in the first hour after the fire had started that even then-President Donald Trump called upon France to act quickly with flying water tankers.

The documentary of the fire tells its own story best, but the human heroism that counteracted human error that day goes down into the history books for all time. This presence of mind doesn't even include the foresight, despite the "all-clear," to empty the sanctuary of its 700 worshippers during the 6:00 vesper service. But within the literal "nick of time," a human chain had formed to barricade the relics from utter destruction. As onlookers wept and prayed and sang in the streets in sheer disbelief and horror, 100 human shields--including firefighters, police officers, church personnel, and city officials--walked as living sacrifices right into the path of certain death to hand off the church's most sacred relics to safety. It was Father Jean-Marc Fournier who insisted upon this plan, having been himself a fearless survivor of Afghanistan.

Relics important to the Catholic faith were spared, as was the Grand Organ which sat under the eaves of the collapsing forest-hewn roof. As clouds of lead dust billowed through its sonorous pipes, it suffered only damage that could be restored. This alone was deemed as a miracle because, when the 315-foot spire collapsed amid gasps of physical pain from the thousands of onlookers, its 250-ton weight pierced through the stone ceiling that had served as the sanctuary's shield from the "burning forest" roof. But even this moment of near-certain doom met with masterminded feats of engineering. Robots penetrated the unapproachable blaze, and human genius defied gravity up the tower cavities to put out the fire surrounding the massive scaffolding that had been erected for the renovation.

Reports say that Notre Dame Cathedral came within as little as 15 minutes of complete destruction that day. If the fire had reached the eight massive bells in the North Tower, the bells would have fallen like dominoes, pulling down the entire cathedral under their dead weight. But 15 hours later, the fire had finally been put out, and the main stone structure was still standing, including the bell towers. It had taken a community hundreds of years to build this monument to beauty and faith, and it took a community a matter of hours turned into mere moments to save those hundreds of years from total obliteration. The brave men and women who walked into the gates of hell to save relics in their beloved cathedral faced the threat of 2500-degree flames, the heat-energy output of two nuclear bombs. It does not stretch my imagination to believe that the Lord leaned His ear close to those tryst-keepers praying all night in the street for "Our Lady." See The Truth Behind the Notre-Dame Fire.

Conclusion

But does that sound eerily prophetic--the watchman on the wall reassuring that nothing is wrong, when the fire has taken deep root into the church attic unseen? If Benjamin Franklin could say that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, we would have to trace a fire as great as this great cathedral to a single spark of careless inattention. So much beauty and truth gone up in smoke before we can do a thing--is the state of Christianity today the story of Notre Dame Cathedral? Some smile indulgently and say a slow, amused, "No." Clearly, the cathedral was repaired by a massive and tireless endeavor vowed to take only five years. This restoration indeed occurred by December of 2024, with then-elect President Donald Trump in attendance, along with many other world dignitaries. The Grand Organ played once again after having been meticulously cleaned in all its 8000 pipes of toxic lead dust from the collapsing roof. Some things just happen, that is true. But other things never had to happen.

It seems to me that the collapse of corporate worship in evangelical Christianity today has come more from a slow burn with a gradual turning up of the heat to take the frog in the kettle by surprise. But wakeup calls like the burning of Notre Dame not only remind us of the hell to come; they remind us of the Lord's most sobering words in the letters to the seven churches of Asia in Revelation 2 and 3. No, their indictments were not delivered for abandoning physical beauty per se, but they were indeed delivered for the forsaking of moral beauty from the fear of God alone. The truth of the simple saving Gospel had been abandoned or severely compromised in five of the seven churches Christ addressed. Like a cigarette dropped into a forest of old-growth oak trees, the problems were all internal and all avoidable. But did anybody listen as these churches faced an epic threat of removal? These five churches did not survive despite our Lord's intervention but became a hotbed of Islam instead.

At the very least, we would conclude that the story of Notre Dame Cathedral serves as a Maschil for our times--a Psalm calling our history to account, so that we might reexamine the purpose of our houses of worship and decree a time to return to true worship that not only costs us something but that costs us everything. This is not an argument for Romanism but an appeal for a return to the fear of God, the love of the sacred, and the role of beauty and truth in our houses of worship. We saw this tender reverence in the Parisians whose iconic cathedral was spared by the Lord of Hosts that day. We also witnessed the entirely new shine of whitened stone, cleaned from the dust and grime of centuries. Such is the old made new again in the cleansing fires of restoration. See companion blogpost, Returning to God's Word in the Psalms, Book III.