'Cathedrals House the Faithful'

Monday morning, when the cardiologist was finished with my heart, they wheeled me back to the recovery room where I learned about the fire that had gutted Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris. In our foolishness we assume some earthly things are eternal. I was shocked and tempted to read the event as further evidence of the West’s decline, our betrayal of all that is most noble in humanity. I have wandered through Notre-Dame twice, in 1973 and 1999. I’m ignorant when it comes to architecture, though I read up on the cathedral before both visits. The only other structure I have entered that moved me as powerfully was the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., itself a sort of secular cathedral. In his essay “A Stone from the Cathedral” (Barbarian in the Garden, trans. Michael March and Jarosław Anders, 1985), Zbigniew Herbert writes:

“Millions, millions of tons of stone. Between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries more stone was excavated than in Egypt. The eighty cathedrals and five hundred churches built in this period, if gathered together, would effect a mountain range erected by human hands. In one of my books I saw a drawing of a façade of a Greek temple imposed on the façade of a Gothic cathedral. It was clear that many an Acropolis could be contained, as in a suitcase, inside cathedrals like Amiens or Reims. However, little results from such comparisons, at least little that would tell us about the functions of sacred buildings in different periods. The temples of antiquity housed the gods; cathedrals house the faithful. The immortals are always less numerous than their believers.”