Within a few days of the fire that destroyed the roof and spire of Notre Dame de Paris, a handful of French billionaires had pledged almost one billion dollars toward the reconstruction of the famous church. No sooner had the donors come forward and the populist cries of the Yellow Vests and others rose to denounce the offers of the wealthy as acts of vainglorious competition in light of their resistance to paying higher taxes that could better serve their less fortunate compatriots. Funny how things play out from different perspectives.
As the news and people’s reaction came streaming, I started thinking about our human experience with building and destroying symbols and houses of worship which, over the course of history, looks like a tapestry of all the good and bad that human nature is capable to produce. So here I share these thoughts with you.
First, what is it with the human inclination to consume extravagant amounts of treasure and effort to build monuments and temples dedicated to the worship of God? Humans have a long history of dedicating some of their most impressive and expensive structures to Gods. Thus, I found that long before the Stonehenge circle was put in place, another people had erected huge curved stones as a sign of worship in Gobekli Tepe in southeastern Turkey around 11,000 years ago. And let’s not forget that of the seven wonders of the ancient world, three were religious structures.
Why have humans dedicated large amounts of resources and aesthetic attention to houses of worship? One view is that we consider temples and churches to be the House of God although we don’t believe that God necessarily resides in them. But as with so many attributes we ascribe to God, what we actually do is to project our own anthropocentric ideas as to how great a house of worship ought to be and look. And, as in other areas of human life, houses of worship become tools of antagonism as we try to show that our God is superior and deserves more grandeur. So, a few centuries after Christianity had triumphed over polytheism, Christians built Hagia Sophia to outshine the Parthenon. And centuries later, as the Popes were trying to assert their preeminence in the Western Christian world, Rome built the St. Peter’s Basilica to outshine Hagia Sophia of Byzantine Constantinople. Ironically, caught up in this race for bigger greatness, houses of worship that are supposed to summon the exaltation of virtue are not always erected by virtuous means. Parthenon is such a case. After Pericles had moved the Treasury of the Delian League from the island of Delos to Athens, he did not hesitate to expropriate its funds to pay for the construction of the Parthenon.
More consequential and historically fateful was the construction of St. Peter’s Basilica on the site of the old church dedicated by Emperor Constantin to St. Peter around 320 CE. Twelve centuries later, Pope Julius II decided to construct a much more monumental and elaborate church. However, lack of funds led him to intensify the sale of indulgences, which for some reason were a lot more popular among the faithful of North and Central Europe. It was the unscrupulous promotion of indulgences as a way to shorten one’s stay in the Purgatory that, among other reasons, spurred Martin Luther to write his 95 Theses and nail them to the door of the Wittenberg castle church on 31 October 1517. And, as we say, the rest is history. And what history it has been indeed!
Unfortunately houses of worship have fallen victims of antagonism and friction in other more devastating ways. Thus, in their second campaign against the Greeks in 480 BCE, the Persians destroyed the old temples on Acropolis. One hundred fifty years later, the conquering armies of Alexander the Great avenged that offense by burning Persepolis to the ground without sparing its sacred structures. The Jewish Temple of Jerusalem twice was destroyed within seven centuries, first by the Babylonians and then by the Romans. By the time Hagia Sophia was completed under Emperor Justinian I in 537 CE, the Roman and Greek temples laid in ruin or were converted into Christian churches and shrines as the successors of Emperor Constantine outlawed the worship of the old Gods. The same fate awaited the shrines of Druid and Nordic Gods as the new religion spread across Europe. In our days, we have witnessed the destruction of Buddhish and Hindu temples by the Taliban in Afghanistan, of Babylonian and Assyrian religious monuments as well as Christian churches and Islamic mosques in Iraq, and ancient Roman and Greek religious monuments in Palmyra by ISIS.
In all cases, the voice of history speaks volumes of our sectarian sense of religious superiority and, worse, of intolerance.
So, coming back to the Notre Dame, let’s dare ask, should it be rebuilt? Of course, from Macron down the reaction has been a resounding “We ‘ll rebuild it!” But a rebuilt Notre Dame will not be the same. Twentieth first technology applied to a medieval structure will yield a mongrel of architecture. But these are the times of theme parks and Disney Lands. We like to live the past or exotic in the present. Resurrecting authentic monuments of bygone eras into modern versions of their original selves does not help us relive history. If that was possible, we would have rebuilt Parthenon long ago. But it would be a sacrilegious thing to do. Do we want to walk through theme parks of history or through the relics of history as they have come down to us in full manifestation of the inglorious or accidental events that defaced them so we learn from our mistakes and transgressions?
And if Notre Dame is to be restored, let’s ask “for whom?” I would say, not for the wealthy of France; not in the name of human vanity; and, out of respect for the divine, not for God’s glorification. The damage of Notre Dame saddened religious and secular people. Our human progress is that today most of us, irrespective of ethnic origin or religious beliefs, look at the destruction of religious and cultural monuments by natural causes or fanatic sects as our collective loss. Like the Parthenon, Notre Dame and the great historical religious monuments of other faiths and cultures have transcended their original purpose. They belong to all of humanity. Notre Dame will remain a grand symbol of Catholic faith, but let the new Notre Dame summon us to a new sense of universal tolerance. Although it suffered in the hands of the French Revolution, let it stand for liberté, égalité, fraternité.
Let's Reason 
I greatly enjoyed reading this. It took me back to my college days of studying art history.
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