Changing Notre Dame

Rolling Stone fulfills Tex's prophecies.
Yet the damage wrought by the Notre Dame fire has also raised important questions about the cathedral’s symbolic significance in an increasingly divided France, and how to rebuild (or which version of the cathedral should be rebuilt) going forward — and in some ways, these questions are one and the same....

for some people in France, Notre Dame has also served as a deep-seated symbol of resentment, a monument to a deeply flawed institution and an idealized Christian European France that arguably never existed in the first place. “The building was so overburdened with meaning that its burning feels like an act of liberation,” says Patricio del Real, an architecture historian at Harvard University. If nothing else, the cathedral has been viewed by some as a stodgy reminder of “the old city — the embodiment of the Paris of stone and faith — just as the Eiffel Tower exemplifies the Paris of modernity, joie de vivre and change,” Michael Kimmelmann wrote for the New York Times....

some architectural historians like Brigniani believe that would be complicated, given the many stages of the cathedral’s evolution. “The question becomes, which Notre Dame are you actually rebuilding?,” he says. Harwood, too, believes that it would be a mistake to try to recreate the edifice as it once stood, as LeDuc did more than 150 years ago. Any rebuilding should be a reflection not of an old France, or the France that never was — a non-secular, white European France — but a reflection of the France of today, a France that is currently in the making. “The idea that you can recreate the building is naive. It is to repeat past errors, category errors of thought, and one has to imagine that if anything is done to the building it has to be an expression of what we want — the Catholics of France, the French people — want. What is an expression of who we are now? What does it represent, who is it for?,” he says.

5 comments:

E Hines said...

The nattering nabobs of negativism are loose, again, I see.

From the cited excerpt: which Notre Dame are you actually rebuilding?

Why, all of them, each in their sections.

As to Harwood's charge that The idea that you can recreate the building is naive, count me naive. But not for his puerile reasons.

Eric Hines

ymarsakar said...

Because the Altar was destroyed or damaged, this is very positive for the entire area's energy grid. No longer is that area of France under the dominion of power, lust, corruption, and fear as in times past.

It is a strange incidence but I am satisfied no matter what the conclusions are now.

Texan99 said...

But to my amazement, I haven't yet read any carping about how the billionaires should have given more, because they're so rich, or that they should have donated the money to a more deserving cause. "Three hundred silver pieces or more . . . ."

Dad29 said...

Ah, well, Tex, AOC has not yet weighed in....

Assistant Village Idiot said...

I noticed the continued evasion "Some people..." "some architectural historians..." Would they like to put this to a vote, to see how many of them there really are? The objection "Which Notre Dame Cathedral" is also an evasion. Believers, and semi-believers, and mere traditionalists would all settle for any of them, or be glad to negotiate that out.

I wrote just last month that the attacks on Western Civ are really attacks on Christ. https://assistantvillageidiot.blogspot.com/2019/03/christian-as-identity-part-iii.html