On April 15, I came in from mowing the lawn and turned on the news to find that a fire had broken out at one of the great monuments of the Western world. Cathédrale Basilique Notre Dame de Paris was about to suffer a terrible tragedy. For the rest of the day and well into the night, I watched centuries of art, culture, and history rendered into ash and embers as firefighters and priests struggled to save what they could. I have never set foot in France, nor have I ever been inside any Catholic church building, let alone a cathedral so magnificent as Notre Dame. But I felt a kinship with strangers through space and time on that day, for we share deep historical roots despite our differences.
I listened to the newscasters tell the audience of the history of the building; how it was built during the 12th and 13th centuries, then modified and renovated several times thereafter; how it played host to calls for the Crusades, coronations, baptisms, and funerals; how it was vandalized and threatened with destruction on several occasions, from the Huguenots to the French Revolution to the Nazis, only to catch fire that fateful day. They spoke of the men who built it, how they knew that they were building not for themselves but for posterity, as they would never live to see it finished. I recalled the work of the French intellectual Georges Bataille. Though a Catholic early in life who became an atheist[1], his understanding of religious notions of expenditure, loss, and sacrifice[2] was unparalleled among modern philosophers. Bataille considered how ruling classes in pre-modern times spent fortunes on “the production of sacred things” that would serve as a rallying point for a culture through the creation and reinforcement of immaterial, transcendent, spiritual values. Bataille criticized the ruling classes of his day, and would say even worse of today's rulers, for failing to understand this principle of material loss for immaterial gain, instead being pathologically committed to the maximization of materialist utility.[3]
As the fire spread, the talking heads called in other members of the pundit class to offer their thoughts. Much of this went as aforementioned, discussing the history and symbolism of the building as well as their own experiences in visiting it. But a few commentators dared to speak of what might have caused the fire. All such speculation was quickly hushed and denigrated as spreading conspiracy theories[4], even though church vandalism in France has been on the rise recently[5] and there were declared to be no signs of arson well before a proper investigation could possibly have concluded.[6] In fairness, this is understandable in a sense; too many reprisals have occurred throughout history because a culprit was blamed before the evidence was properly examined. But I had to wonder: would such speculation of potential arson be shut down so quickly if it were a historic mosque or synagogue burning instead?
Price, S.R.F. (1986). Rituals and power: the Roman imperial cult in Asia Minor. Cambridge University Press. pp. 20, 204–5.
MacCormack, Sabine (1972). “Change and Continuity in Late Antiquity: the ceremony of 'Adventus'”. Historia, 21, 4, p. 721–52.
Fishwick, Duncan (1991). The Imperial Cult in the Latin West: Studies in the Ruler Cult of the Western Provinces of the Roman Empire, vol. 1. Brill Publishers. pp. 1, 6–20.
