Would it be acceptable to use something other than wooden beams and a lead roof?
I read that there are no trees big enough these days to replace the original ceiling beams so it would have to be a different technique anyway
Large quantities of seasoned large oak timbers will be hard to source - partly because if they are not already cut then time is needed. It was an issue following the Windsor fire here.
After the York Minster fire a careful study was done on the roof, and the decision was made to go for oak again. There were various reasons. If steel beams had been present in the original structure the expansion caused by the heat of the fire would have broken the walls. Also oak was the only material with a proven 500 year record. The beams used were then specified with (IIRC) dimensions 2cm larger than required in the basis that if there is another fire, the first 2cm will turn to charcoal, but the weight bearing capacity of the timber will still suffice.
Lead, similarly, properly installed, has a 100 year life expectancy - unmatched by any other roof sheeting solutions.
I think small and large donators paid up out of a visceral response to the destruction of something so iconic and beautiful. I came close to giving a tenner! It was my natural response to watching the flames tear it down.
I think small and large donators paid up out of a visceral response to the destruction of something so iconic and beautiful. I came close to giving a tenner! It was my natural response to watching the flames tear it down.
Yes. But as has been pointed out, the building is State property. The divisive question is just what people are giving for. I doubt very much that many of the gifts are in view of any spiritual significance of the building.
And as @la vie en rouge points out, there's been no word of the Church as an institution giving any money, while at the same time one of their spokesmen is quite happy to tell the State that it should shut up when Our Lady is talking.
There could be no better illustration of the worlds of French secularity and French Catholicism colliding.
Like I say, to my mind there's about as much unanimity in this "coming together" as in the "Leave" vote for Brexit.
There's broad agreement that it's precious to many, and a powerful symbol that should be rebuilt, but no agreement at all about what it's a symbol of.
To my mind this event at "kilometre zero" of France embodies a historic tussle for its soul between Church and secular State. The Interior Minister claimed it was "not a cathedral but common heritage"; a representative of the Church says it's the holy mother of us all. This latent conflict is not going away any time soon.
It seems to me that for those of us who were deeply shaken and distressed by the sight of Notre Dame burning, that this represented the loss of something intangible but nevertheless immensely significant and not reducible to a religious or cultural symbol.
I hadn't expected to feel so dismayed, in part because I had never thought Notre Dame might be destroyed. It reminded me of watching images of the loss of the ruins of Palmyra in Syria in 2015, that this was not just about the wanton destruction of temples and ancient tombs sculptures, art, living hitory, but something irreplaceable being taken away from the shared human imagination. Notre Dame and Palmyra represent something of how we became who we are, our past and an enduring vision of our aspirations. In the UNESCO statement put out yesterday, I looked at this phrase and it resonated (to use Galilit's word): "a place that is unique in our collective imagination".
@MaryLouise I think UNESCO has it absolutely right (I also thought of Palmyra, too), but that both the Catholic church in France and the French State are presently supremely ill-equipped to address such a concept when it relates to a place of worship.
In this sense, the French Interior Minister is absolutely correct, from a Republican point of view, that Notre Dame is "not a cathedral, but common heritage".
At the same time, the first part of this statement is plainly nonsense.
The fact that the State owns a lot of historically Church heritage makes this conundrum especially difficult to resolve in France.
Mirroring the Republican stance outlined above, the Catholic church's visceral dislike of the secular state, which they see as an aberration that's lasted since 1905, amounts to a similar official non-recognition of that state, even as the latter is pouring money into restoring Notre Dame and cancelling major Presidential addresses to deal with the crisis.
I think the places described as “thin” generally aren’t any closer to the divine. Rather, they’re places where there seem to be fewer distractions to keep us from being attuned to the divine.
This makes a lot of sense. But I also think that people hallow a place by praying there, or worshiping there, or meditating there, or whatever. Just as we wear the grass thin and hten bare by walking in the same place, we wear the veil thin by applied spirituality/holiness in a place.
Yes, this.
A prison chapel I went into was a hallowed place, tangibly. There was nothing asthetically pleasing about it, but the centuries of prayer were embedded into its atmosphere.
I mentioned this last Sunday in my sermon on "The stones themselves will cry out". In particular I recalled visiting Gwennap Pit in Cornwall (very positive vibes even on a cold April evening) and the Olympiastadion in Berlin (back in 1971 when it still felt very "Nazi" and gave me the creeps). I say this even though I am not particularly sensitive to "place", unlike my wife.
As far as Notre-Dame is concerned, I've never been to Paris and my feelings about it are purely cultural. Of course accept both its spiritual importance and the sense that it holds the soul of the nation - but for others.
My theology is very much 'people before things' since placing things above people smacks of materialism and idolatry. Wedded into that is stewardship of creation, which I think is driven by a reverence for life. These values make me place artefacts at best as a poor third in the priority list.
But .....
I recognise that the best of artefacts, great music, great buildings etc, are in some sense both an homage to creation and creativity, and a source of emotional and aesthetic power. We relate to them because they are beautiful and expressive.
I guess there is in my mind a dividing line between those senses of awareness and affection, which I think are life enhancing, and the worship of things. It's not always easy to draw.
If the restoration of Notre Dame is about the State and (Catholic) church coming together, then the Vatican needs to put its money where its mouth is.
BT’s idea is interesting – I’m not sure I’d call it a spirituality of place, exactly, but I do think there is a sense of memory in certain places. Just over the river from Notre Dame is the Conciergerie, once a notorious jail where the Revolution kept its prisoners, Marie-Antoinette included*, before carting them off to the guillotine. (If memory serves, Robespierre also ended up there once the worm turned.) I’ve visited, and the knowledge of what happened there makes it feel like a thoroughly evil place to me. It’s like the stones remember somehow.
*bit a tangent, but if we’re talking about the national identity of the French, I’m convinced that their psyche is influenced by being a nation of regicides. They tend to be proud of their revolutionary history, but the Terror is a bit of an embarrassment. Interestingly, royalists are still around the place, and they are generally ardent Catholics. In the context of “French history is Catholic”, you can make of that what you will.
Putting this in a separate comment, because it doesn’t really fit with the other one.
I am currently applying for French nationality. I have just found examples of a test some applicants have to take to prove their knowledge of French history and culture (I don’t, because I am applying on the basis of being married to a French person, which gets you an easier ride). Anyway, one of the multiple choice questions was this:
The Catholic religion is:
A: the official state religion
B: a banned religion
C: a religion among others
Note sure how Euty’s bishop feels about this question .
Well in a recent press release about different faiths he forgot the protestants altogether, which resulted in a rather cross exchange of words between us
Well in a recent press release about different faiths he forgot the protestants altogether, which resulted in a rather cross exchange of words between us
Tangent// Mind you, I've known British Anglicans "forget" all about Nonconformists, too! // Ends.
Interesting point about regicides, la vie en rouge, of course, so are the English. I don't think it's embarrassing, as it's probably erased. Of course, republicanism is rather vulgar, and maybe also rather chic, whereas in France it seems a central motif. Now in Ireland ...
Christianity is an incarnational religion, which means matter matters. If we say the spiritual matters but the physical does not, we risk becoming docetists or gnostics. A hazard we must avoid falling into is rejecting the holiness of things and the holiness of place. By becoming man, Christ made matter sacred. I think something of this fallacy is implicit by people who think it's important to convert people but not to feed them.
Yes this is a Christian website but sometimes I do not think it is about God or Christianity. I did not give anything but I could easily imagine having done so. For me it wouldn't be a bit about Catholicism and I couldn't care less whether the Vatican gives except as far as as there is enough money. Notre Dame is beautiful and felt eternal so it was very upsetting when it burnt. I cannot think of any secular buildings of that age and beauty--because when Notre Dame was built not many resources were put into most non-secular buildings--but if one burns, I will find it as upsetting.
A place like Notre Dame exists at different levels. It can be seen as religious, spiritual, a symbol of France, an image of human creativity, a stone narrative of history, and so on. Each to their own.
So many thoughts about this, not very Christian ones, I'm afraid. Loss and death, but also life going on. How many times does this happen, and sometimes it seems too much to go on, but life goes on, and we carry on breathing and thinking and loving. It's complete.
Eutychus,I get the feeling that for you the word 'laicite' means that the Catholic community should not be allowed to express its belief in what its mission in and to the world is. Surely if indeed there is a level playing field Catholics should have the same rights as anyone else openly to express their faith.
It cannot be denied that France has had, for better or worse, a Catholic past. Whatever the word 'Catholic' means it is a word which many French people in some way still identify in some sense with.
I think that in England, which has had a CofE past, many people, even those who do not go to church, will in some way, at some deep level, identify with the 'good old CofE'
For people's information to the best of my knowledge 'Thin Spaces' is a George Macleodism. He used 'thin' because he wanted a term to use of the numinous quality he experienced on Iona that did not sound too religious. He was after all a Presbyterian clergyman. I find it ironic that it has since to be seen as part of the belief system of Celtic Christianity.
It's been 'read back' into the immediate post-Roman period in these islands. That said, as a Welshman, well Anglo Welsh ... I do think there is a propensity among the Scots, Welsh and Irish in particular to go in for 'genius locii' and sometimes sentimental attachments to places - perhaps because they've tended to have disaporas.
The 'hiraeth' and so on.
I'm with Mousethief and the Orthodox on the matter matters issue, but it still worries me to an extent - witness the unedifying turf wars over holy sites in Israel. Witness the rise of right-wing politics in Poland and Hungary banging on about Europe's Christian past.
I once heard an Orthodox priest from Wales claim that a particular valley earmarked for a reservoir has been saved as it had been granted to a particular Saint 'in perpetuity'. Which sounded most odd.
I've been slow to contribute here, if it even matters that I would or should. My heart has been so full, this event feels so personal on account of past life recall - but whatever, not important.
In order to address the phenomenon of "sacred place" I think it might be helpful to first think about the ways by which we "know". Not just epistemology, but the neurology of how we receive and process information. There's a lot of great work that is uncovering the role of the enteric brain in cognition, but the IMO the science is in its infancy.
To put it in a nutshell, what I understand so far is that we have not one brain but TWO brains - a head-brain and a gut-brain. The human digestive tract has as many neurons as the human brain. (As a side observation, if you look at the coil of the human intestines and the coil of the cerebral cortex, these coils echo one another. As above so below, or as below so above.)
The way that information comes in is through sensory information that is translated as electrical impulses. The head-brain is the gatekeeper and switching station for all incoming signals. It knows what the body tastes, sees, hears, smells and feels.
The gut-brain, on the other hand, only knows what it feels. It transmits what it "knows" through feelings and sensations. The master switching station of the head-brain takes in this information "under advisement" in the sense that it filters all information, and in a non-threatening situation, will deliver a verdict.
I other words, your gut-brain may be telling you something is off, but your head-brain can override this information if the other sensory information doesn't support the gut-brain's input. "Nope, don't see or hear or smell or taste anything that supports your feelings, gut-brain, so take a back seat." I think we can all relate to this - that time we regret that we let our brain talk us out of our first response from the gut.
There is speculation and study that suggests the gut-brain's signaling can bypass the censorship of the left hemisphere and communicate directly through the reptilian complex or through the right non-verbal hemisphere in symbols and imagery.
So what does this have to do with sacred place?
There's a group of thinkers who think that every form of energy that exists has been detected and measured by instrumentation we have invented, and that every secret of the universe is discoverable within this narrow bandwidth, using technology that already exists, and if our instrumentation cannot detect it, it therefore doesn't exist.
This strikes me as being as reasonable as the reaction of a medieval peasant if he were told that he is swimming in a sea of gamma rays, X rays, microwaves and radio waves. He would simply say "What are those things? You are crazy."
Just because we don't have the instrumentation to detect other forms of energy doesn't mean they don't exist.
But what if WE are the instrument through which other forms of energy are detected? What if the gut-brain receives and transmits these forms of energy as neural impulses of feeling, and in images?
What if the PLACE is the intersection of one or more forms of subtle energy, that we are capable of detecting through feeling, but by no other means yet developed?
We diminish the importance of signs and visions and gut-feelings in our everyday transactions. But if I may share something here, I saw this event three days before it happened.
On Friday morning I woke from a vivid dream where I was standing on the Quai St Michel in front of the hotel where I usually stay, and I saw the cathedral engulfed in smoke and flame. I felt like it was the start of WWIII - some great doom was falling on France and the world. I told my partner about it, it disturbed me that much. Then on Monday afternoon the images came in, and I recognized them from my dream of four nights earlier.
I believe we are wired to receive information that is available through some type of energy grid that we have not yet been able to quantify to the satisfaction of out left hemispheric gate keeper and dictator.
It's worth noting that the gothic cathedrals of Europe have almost all been sited on ancient places of worship, places that have been chosen because of how they feel. Is it a coincidence that the great gothic Notre Dames of France have been laid out on the earth in the pattern of the constellation of Virgo, with the tiny Notre Dame de l'Epine in the position of the star Epi?
I don't have any answers, just questions. But I have learned to trust my gut.
Eutychus I am pretty sure that both you and I are well aware of the legal position of the CofE in England and the RC church in France and ,of course, they are not the same. I absolutely agree with you.
I am also pretty sure that you will agree with me that the legal position of any particular religious group in any country is not ultimately of great importance to the individual believer, as long as they are allowed to practice their faith..
I should ,of course, have made it clear that what I was talking about was the place that the respective Christian communities have in the minds and hearts of the general populace even of those who have little or no connection with the particular religious communities.
That's what I was thinking of, too. IMHO it has to be a "both/and," because different needs are met by food pantries and Notre Dame. But both sets of human needs are real, and we can't simply cancel out either without losing something of our humanity.
Eutychus,I get the feeling that for you the word 'laicite' means that the Catholic community should not be allowed to express its belief in what its mission in and to the world is.
I've never said any such thing. What is upsetting is what it continues to convey: the idea that it is the One True Church to which all French belong whether they like it or not.
It cannot be denied that France has had, for better or worse, a Catholic past.
Indeed it can't, but my contention is that the Catholic church is stuck in the past.
Claiming Notre Dame is the mother of us all in 2019 displays as much denial as a senior government minister claiming it isn't a cathedral.
Last Sunday a colleague of mine attended Sunday morning Mass in the central church of a coastal town in Normandy, a region with above average numbers of practising Catholics, with a population of around 14,000, and counted 60 people in attendance.
The Catholic church in France continuing to behave as if it's the only show in town, to the virtual exclusion of the State let alone other religions (beyond token recognition), is doing itself a disservice as well as suppressing the voices of other faiths and Christian confessions.
And another thing: it also can’t be denied that “France’s Catholic past” involved some very bloody state-sponsored religious genocide. I have met French Protestants who still have what strikes me as a rather unhealthy persecution complex, but I can see their point. Before the twentieth-century, there had been more religious martyrs in France than in any other country in the world. Protestantism was doing rather well in France at one point. Calvin himself was French.
I know History is written by the winners and all that, and I’m not accusing anyone of actual malice, but this fact does rather seem to get glossed over. And yet it does explain quite a bit about the modern, secular French state. Why census data contains no information on religious affiliation, for example. We ain’t going there again.
I know History is written by the winners and all that, and I’m not accusing anyone of actual malice, but this fact does rather seem to get glossed over.
I can't resist pointing to the most egregious, Orwellian example of this I've ever seen.
the Edict of Nantes (...) ordered the destruction of Huguenot churches, as well as the closing of Protestant schools. This policy made official the persecution already enforced since the dragonnades created in 1681 by the king in order to intimidate Huguenots into converting to Catholicism. As a result of the officially sanctioned persecution by the dragoons who were billeted upon prominent Huguenots, a large number of Protestants — estimates range from 210,000 to 900,000 — left France over the next two decades.
This anniversary was marked by the issuing of this stamp.
Featuring the Huguenot cross, it bears the inscription "1685-1985, welcome of the Huguenots - tolerance - pluralism - brotherhood". Over 30 years on from first seeing this stamp, I still can't get over the barefaced rewriting of history it embodies. It's akin to labelling 1945 a victory for Germany, or Pearl Harbor a high point in America-Japan relations. I think French protestants have every reason to be touchy.
It's been 'read back' into the immediate post-Roman period in these islands. That said, as a Welshman, well Anglo Welsh ... I do think there is a propensity among the Scots, Welsh and Irish in particular to go in for 'genius locii' and sometimes sentimental attachments to places - perhaps because they've tended to have disaporas.
During Lent this year I have been playing with the idea of a pilgrimage.
A Christian settlement existed approximately on the site of the present St Machar's Cathedral, Old Aberdeen c580, and from there it has been suggested that the monks paddled upriver along the Don, establishing preaching stations. Churches were subsequently built on these sites. Many of these medieval churches now lie in ruins.
The North East Man and I have been visiting the churches by the banks of the Don, mostly by car, but I would like to walk the route at some point. I have been trying to imagine the route by which the Gospel was carried to the place on which the church in which we now worship was built.
I have felt a sense of "thin places" with the centuries all mashed up together. For example, St Fergus' is a ruin, with a Pictish carved cross inside the ruins, but has a current cemetery adjacent to it. The cemetery contains the graves of the Luftwaffe crews who were shot down as they attempted to bomb Aberdeen, adjacent to the graves of Allied troops. A small piece of Aberdeenshire which is forever Germany.
Two of the churches have carvings of the Pictish beast, which is my Ship avatar. Three of the churches have pre-Reformation carved stone Sacrament Houses (aumbries); two of which were carefully partially defaced during the Reformation. These places have seen worship in many forms; Celtic, Roman Catholic, Protestant, burials over many centuries, and some are now forgotten ruins and rarely visited, whilst others still have active congregations.
I'm not quite sure where I'm going with this, other than that I want to explore further and seek out other such places for contemplation and prayer. Trying to work out my own identity and theology of place.
Thank you, Eutychus, for the information about the 1985 stamp. Is it not up to Christians of varying confessions to explain what they mean ? I thought that the French state is indeed a secular state . that doesn't necessarily make it a better place. The Revolutionary watchwords of 'Liberty, Equality and Fraternity' have not yet been completely fulfilled in the secular state, any more than the words of Christ that we should 'love God and love our neighbour as ourselves.'within the various Christian bodies. As imperfect human beings we have much to do to try to follow the ideals which we claim to espouse, whether they be religious or secular.
Of course I accept that the French state and the French Catholic church have much to answer for in their persecution of Protestants. At the same time I am aware of religious persecution in many parts of Europe of those who did not follow the line proposed by the state , including the many hundreds of Catholics in England and above all in Ireland. I am aware of the religious persecutions on both sides within the German speaking states as well as the religious persecutions in Scotland between the Protestant monarchy and state and the differing and warring Protestant groups.
For those of us who are Christians, we realise and deplore those situations from the past and yes, amongst those who are the inheritors of the communities which were actively discriminated against there remains a memory of these difficult times.
Following Christ and living the Christian life is something dynamic, but there remains for all Christians also a sense that their religion is not something new and dynamic but also has a connection with the past. Many French Protestants, including those who belong to older 'established' bodies may take great comfort and pride in the sacrifices which their forefathers made.
We have to understand that for the majority of French people that past is one which is intimately involved with the Catholic church. The building which is known around the world, simply and easily recognisably, as Notre Dame is intimately bound up with the history, both good and bad, of the French state and obviously also with the Catholic Church. It is, however ,more than simply a building of the French state used for Catholic rites. It is an iconic building which tells us that, yes, the secular republic has a soul. Whether that 'soul' is the same as the 'immortal soul' of Christian teaching is another question.
Also, I'm curious what is meant by a building being hallowed by people worshiping in it. Is this seen an an actual spiritual aura, as it were, that the place acquires? Some kind of intrinsic spirituality of place? Or more that once people associate a place with prayer, then it becomes hallowed in their mind because of association? And maybe when people are in there praying, then there is an atmosphere of reverence and prayer?
I'm thinking that when I was younger, whenever I visited a cathedral, I saw them as tourist places, historical buildings. No sense of hallowedness. I'd never worshipped in one, and I would be visiting them as historical places, kind of similar to stately homes. Didn't associate them with my faith at all. I would get a sense of God's presence in the simple Baptist churches I went to, because I worshipped there and so I associated them with God and holiness. Once I'd started worshipping at C of E and Catholic churches, I got a sense of how those sort of services worked, and a sense of God there. And now, having worshipped in various old Catholic churches and cathedrals, now if I go to a cathedral, I do get a sense of it being a holy place to pray in. But to me that is my association I bring to it, rather than it being intrinsically hallowed. To me, it is in people, not place, where God is found.
To me, it is in people, not place, where God is found.
My perspective in this respect was forever changed by a pastor who has planted several churches in the grimier ends of cities. He said that cities were the place where one was most surrounded by God's creation: people.
Some places do have a powerful sense of holiness accumulated from centuries of pilgrims and their prayers. The crypt of the Basilica of St Francis in Assisi where the saint is buried has an almost overwhelming sense of the presence of God.
But I also encountered this when visiting the famous C15th Zen rock garden of Roanji Temple in Kyoto. It is thought to represent infinity and it has a remarkable effect on people. They would walk up to it and immediately fall silent and start meditating before it for 15 minutes or longer. I've never seen that happen before.
Also, I'm curious what is meant by a building being hallowed by people worshiping in it. Is this seen an an actual spiritual aura, as it were, that the place acquires? Some kind of intrinsic spirituality of place? Or more that once people associate a place with prayer, then it becomes hallowed in their mind because of association? And maybe when people are in there praying, then there is an atmosphere of reverence and prayer?
For me, there is a sense that this is a spot where everything human has changed, but the eternal truths remain. In my church, there have been prayers for congregants fighting in the Second World War / the First World War / the Boer War / the Crimean War and no doubt many wars before that. Generations have been baptised, grown old and been buried.
We have raised money to ransom men captured by Barbary pirates, to buy grain for Ireland during the famine, to fund missions to India, comforts for troops and on and on.
We have argued, over and over and over again about music. The pews have changed from box pews, to semi-circular, to straight and now might be removed altogether. People have suffered from diseases now consigned to the history books. The nature of scandal has changed - we punished people for witchcraft in the C16th, breaking the Sabbath in the C18th and for ante-nuptial fornication in the C19th. People have worshipped in this spot for 1,400 years; their theology and forms of worship have changed beyond all recognition.
And here am I, where tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands have gone before, and I sing "We blossom and flourish like leaves on a tree, And wither, and perish, but naught changeth Thee."
I think that it is significant that those interviewed around the burning Notre Dame who claimed to be Christian were those who were most positive about the future. The building itself, hallowed possibly through time and history, may perish or change but the Christian community will continue. The Church is not the building, which we call church ,chapel , basilica or cathedral but rather the living stones of the Christian community who use the building. Again I think it significant that the religious authorities who use the building very quickly intimated that the Holy Week ceremonies at the centre of the Christian commemoration of the Passion,Death and Resurrection of Christ which would have taken place in Notre Dame would be moved to St Eustache and St Sulpice.
To me, it is in people, not place, where God is found.
My perspective in this respect was forever changed by a pastor who has planted several churches in the grimier ends of cities. He said that cities were the place where one was most surrounded by God's creation: people.
Also, I'm curious what is meant by a building being hallowed by people worshiping in it. Is this seen an an actual spiritual aura, as it were, that the place acquires? Some kind of intrinsic spirituality of place? Or more that once people associate a place with prayer, then it becomes hallowed in their mind because of association? And maybe when people are in there praying, then there is an atmosphere of reverence and prayer?
I'm thinking that when I was younger, whenever I visited a cathedral, I saw them as tourist places, historical buildings. No sense of hallowedness. I'd never worshipped in one, and I would be visiting them as historical places, kind of similar to stately homes. Didn't associate them with my faith at all. I would get a sense of God's presence in the simple Baptist churches I went to, because I worshipped there and so I associated them with God and holiness. Once I'd started worshipping at C of E and Catholic churches, I got a sense of how those sort of services worked, and a sense of God there. And now, having worshipped in various old Catholic churches and cathedrals, now if I go to a cathedral, I do get a sense of it being a holy place to pray in. But to me that is my association I bring to it, rather than it being intrinsically hallowed. To me, it is in people, not place, where God is found.
It was a surprise to me that I felt the tangible sacredness of the prison chapel I went to, it certainly wasn't something I brought with me. (Quite the opposite, in fact, I don't look for such things. I'm more likely to have a shiver run down my spine when visiting churches, as I take in the memorial plaques.)
When I mentioned it, the chaplain said that people often remarked on the sense of holiness in the chapel. She thought that the place had been saturated by the prayers said in it for hundreds of years.
And another thing: it also can’t be denied that “France’s Catholic past” involved some very bloody state-sponsored religious genocide. I have met French Protestants who still have what strikes me as a rather unhealthy persecution complex, but I can see their point. Before the twentieth-century, there had been more religious martyrs in France than in any other country in the world. Protestantism was doing rather well in France at one point. Calvin himself was French. ...
I'm here because my French Protestant ancestors fled religious violence; my many-times great-grandfather was orphaned by a mob, and escaped with his aunt and her family. I recommend a visit to the French Protestant Museum in La Rochelle to get a full picture.
I agree beauty is important. I suppose to me, the most beauty is not in expensive buildings, but in the natural world, and in each other. And holiness is not something to be preserved, like a pickle, but always there, alive and fresh, from God, and can be expressed through people. It is something we renew constantly by returning to God, focusing on God, and loving others with his love.
Thinking about it, restoring old buildings doesn't seem to me to be preserving history - but making something new. Not that people shouldn't do it. The burning is part of the history though. Ruins left as they are seem more to be preserving history to me. But restoring means a building can have its function and appearance restored, which may be important. I think I see history being preserved more in people - memories, writings, traditions, etc. Though 'preserved' is not the word I would use - I see it as more fluid, more alive, because history is told through people's perspectives, understood through people's perspectives, and perspectives and understanding differ from person to person, from era to era.
And another thing: it also can’t be denied that “France’s Catholic past” involved some very bloody state-sponsored religious genocide. I have met French Protestants who still have what strikes me as a rather unhealthy persecution complex, but I can see their point. Before the twentieth-century, there had been more religious martyrs in France than in any other country in the world. Protestantism was doing rather well in France at one point. Calvin himself was French. ...
I'm here because my French Protestant ancestors fled religious violence; my many-times great-grandfather was orphaned by a mob, and escaped with his aunt and her family. I recommend a visit to the French Protestant Museum in La Rochelle to get a full picture.
Rossweisse, Huguenot refugees began arriving in the Cape Colony, South Africa, after the Edict of Fontainebleau in 1685. Many of them settled in the valley known as Franschhoek (French Corner) where they established wine farms and married into Afrikaner Calvinist settler families, unfortunately also adapting to the local practice of slave labour. The Huguenot Monument and museum attracts many French tourists each year.
Religious history, its monuments and institutions along with artworks and magnificent music always connotes ambiguity and contradiction...
I have visited this monument and this corner of South Africa. Indeed in many 'corners' of life both ambiguity and contradiction can be found. The persecuted can sometimes become the persecutors and they can do that without necessarily recognising it.
Europeans are not the only people to persecute others who do not share their own form of faith nor the same ethnic origins, others have done and continue to do the same.
For those of us who do have European ancestry I have just been reading a book written (in French) by a White Russian who had escaped from Stalinist Russia by jumping ship in Singapore,at that time a British colony. It details the author's slow journey back to European 'civilisation'. Without meaning at all to be racist it tells of what was simply considered to be the superiority of the white race in the colony. It speaks of the same thing in the British colony of Ceylon, the Portuguese colony of Macao and the French colony of Djibouti. The author while passing through Rome on his way home reminds us of the failure of the Italians in their invasion of Eritrea in the 1890s (to be upsides with other European colonial powers) and while not directly supporting the Italian invasion of Abbysinia in the 1930s indicates that at least the 'white' man had got his own back for the defeat of the 1890s.
Certainly in Europe we have moved on at least officially from what were the accepted opinions of these days.
Forthview, I can't help feeling you're rather proving my point here, about the downplaying by French Catholicism of state-sponsored genocide. Firstly two wrongs don't make a right, and secondly the scale of the persecution of religious minorities in seventeenth century France is in a league rather of its own.
More generally, I'd like to know on what you are basing your assertion that the majority of French people are Catholic in any meaningful sense. I live in a bastion of the Catholic bourgeoisie (the 15th arrondissement of Paris) and even here this just doesn't describe people I know. I mentioned earlier that census information in France specifically excludes religious affiliation. I am also highly resistant to this idea because it seems to me to suggest that "proper" French people are white and don't have immigrant backgrounds. Consider another, rather different locus of French national pride: our World Cup winning football team, the majority of whom come from immigrant families. When you talk about "most French people", why do I suspect you are not thinking of Kylian Mbappé?
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After the York Minster fire a careful study was done on the roof, and the decision was made to go for oak again. There were various reasons. If steel beams had been present in the original structure the expansion caused by the heat of the fire would have broken the walls. Also oak was the only material with a proven 500 year record. The beams used were then specified with (IIRC) dimensions 2cm larger than required in the basis that if there is another fire, the first 2cm will turn to charcoal, but the weight bearing capacity of the timber will still suffice.
Lead, similarly, properly installed, has a 100 year life expectancy - unmatched by any other roof sheeting solutions.
Yes. But as has been pointed out, the building is State property. The divisive question is just what people are giving for. I doubt very much that many of the gifts are in view of any spiritual significance of the building.
And as @la vie en rouge points out, there's been no word of the Church as an institution giving any money, while at the same time one of their spokesmen is quite happy to tell the State that it should shut up when Our Lady is talking.
There could be no better illustration of the worlds of French secularity and French Catholicism colliding.
Or coming together to rebuild something which is precious to them both?
There's broad agreement that it's precious to many, and a powerful symbol that should be rebuilt, but no agreement at all about what it's a symbol of.
To my mind this event at "kilometre zero" of France embodies a historic tussle for its soul between Church and secular State. The Interior Minister claimed it was "not a cathedral but common heritage"; a representative of the Church says it's the holy mother of us all. This latent conflict is not going away any time soon.
I hadn't expected to feel so dismayed, in part because I had never thought Notre Dame might be destroyed. It reminded me of watching images of the loss of the ruins of Palmyra in Syria in 2015, that this was not just about the wanton destruction of temples and ancient tombs sculptures, art, living hitory, but something irreplaceable being taken away from the shared human imagination. Notre Dame and Palmyra represent something of how we became who we are, our past and an enduring vision of our aspirations. In the UNESCO statement put out yesterday, I looked at this phrase and it resonated (to use Galilit's word): "a place that is unique in our collective imagination".
Ah. The news I heard said there aren't trees that size in France.
La République ne reconnaît, ne salarie ni ne subventionne aucun culte: 'the French Republic does not recognise, salary, or subsidise any religion' (article 2 of the 1905 law).
In this sense, the French Interior Minister is absolutely correct, from a Republican point of view, that Notre Dame is "not a cathedral, but common heritage".
At the same time, the first part of this statement is plainly nonsense.
The fact that the State owns a lot of historically Church heritage makes this conundrum especially difficult to resolve in France.
Mirroring the Republican stance outlined above, the Catholic church's visceral dislike of the secular state, which they see as an aberration that's lasted since 1905, amounts to a similar official non-recognition of that state, even as the latter is pouring money into restoring Notre Dame and cancelling major Presidential addresses to deal with the crisis.
Yes, this.
A prison chapel I went into was a hallowed place, tangibly. There was nothing asthetically pleasing about it, but the centuries of prayer were embedded into its atmosphere.
As far as Notre-Dame is concerned, I've never been to Paris and my feelings about it are purely cultural. Of course accept both its spiritual importance and the sense that it holds the soul of the nation - but for others.
But .....
I recognise that the best of artefacts, great music, great buildings etc, are in some sense both an homage to creation and creativity, and a source of emotional and aesthetic power. We relate to them because they are beautiful and expressive.
I guess there is in my mind a dividing line between those senses of awareness and affection, which I think are life enhancing, and the worship of things. It's not always easy to draw.
BT’s idea is interesting – I’m not sure I’d call it a spirituality of place, exactly, but I do think there is a sense of memory in certain places. Just over the river from Notre Dame is the Conciergerie, once a notorious jail where the Revolution kept its prisoners, Marie-Antoinette included*, before carting them off to the guillotine. (If memory serves, Robespierre also ended up there once the worm turned.) I’ve visited, and the knowledge of what happened there makes it feel like a thoroughly evil place to me. It’s like the stones remember somehow.
*bit a tangent, but if we’re talking about the national identity of the French, I’m convinced that their psyche is influenced by being a nation of regicides. They tend to be proud of their revolutionary history, but the Terror is a bit of an embarrassment. Interestingly, royalists are still around the place, and they are generally ardent Catholics. In the context of “French history is Catholic”, you can make of that what you will.
I am currently applying for French nationality. I have just found examples of a test some applicants have to take to prove their knowledge of French history and culture (I don’t, because I am applying on the basis of being married to a French person, which gets you an easier ride). Anyway, one of the multiple choice questions was this:
Note sure how Euty’s bishop feels about this question
Tangent// Mind you, I've known British Anglicans "forget" all about Nonconformists, too! // Ends.
It cannot be denied that France has had, for better or worse, a Catholic past. Whatever the word 'Catholic' means it is a word which many French people in some way still identify in some sense with.
I think that in England, which has had a CofE past, many people, even those who do not go to church, will in some way, at some deep level, identify with the 'good old CofE'
Very true.
That hasn't been the case here for over 200 years and some of the intervening ones have been quite bloody.
The Catholic church has no similar claim in France to that of the CoE today.
It's been 'read back' into the immediate post-Roman period in these islands. That said, as a Welshman, well Anglo Welsh ... I do think there is a propensity among the Scots, Welsh and Irish in particular to go in for 'genius locii' and sometimes sentimental attachments to places - perhaps because they've tended to have disaporas.
The 'hiraeth' and so on.
I'm with Mousethief and the Orthodox on the matter matters issue, but it still worries me to an extent - witness the unedifying turf wars over holy sites in Israel. Witness the rise of right-wing politics in Poland and Hungary banging on about Europe's Christian past.
I once heard an Orthodox priest from Wales claim that a particular valley earmarked for a reservoir has been saved as it had been granted to a particular Saint 'in perpetuity'. Which sounded most odd.
In order to address the phenomenon of "sacred place" I think it might be helpful to first think about the ways by which we "know". Not just epistemology, but the neurology of how we receive and process information. There's a lot of great work that is uncovering the role of the enteric brain in cognition, but the IMO the science is in its infancy.
To put it in a nutshell, what I understand so far is that we have not one brain but TWO brains - a head-brain and a gut-brain. The human digestive tract has as many neurons as the human brain. (As a side observation, if you look at the coil of the human intestines and the coil of the cerebral cortex, these coils echo one another. As above so below, or as below so above.)
The way that information comes in is through sensory information that is translated as electrical impulses. The head-brain is the gatekeeper and switching station for all incoming signals. It knows what the body tastes, sees, hears, smells and feels.
The gut-brain, on the other hand, only knows what it feels. It transmits what it "knows" through feelings and sensations. The master switching station of the head-brain takes in this information "under advisement" in the sense that it filters all information, and in a non-threatening situation, will deliver a verdict.
I other words, your gut-brain may be telling you something is off, but your head-brain can override this information if the other sensory information doesn't support the gut-brain's input. "Nope, don't see or hear or smell or taste anything that supports your feelings, gut-brain, so take a back seat." I think we can all relate to this - that time we regret that we let our brain talk us out of our first response from the gut.
There is speculation and study that suggests the gut-brain's signaling can bypass the censorship of the left hemisphere and communicate directly through the reptilian complex or through the right non-verbal hemisphere in symbols and imagery.
So what does this have to do with sacred place?
There's a group of thinkers who think that every form of energy that exists has been detected and measured by instrumentation we have invented, and that every secret of the universe is discoverable within this narrow bandwidth, using technology that already exists, and if our instrumentation cannot detect it, it therefore doesn't exist.
This strikes me as being as reasonable as the reaction of a medieval peasant if he were told that he is swimming in a sea of gamma rays, X rays, microwaves and radio waves. He would simply say "What are those things? You are crazy."
Just because we don't have the instrumentation to detect other forms of energy doesn't mean they don't exist.
But what if WE are the instrument through which other forms of energy are detected? What if the gut-brain receives and transmits these forms of energy as neural impulses of feeling, and in images?
What if the PLACE is the intersection of one or more forms of subtle energy, that we are capable of detecting through feeling, but by no other means yet developed?
We diminish the importance of signs and visions and gut-feelings in our everyday transactions. But if I may share something here, I saw this event three days before it happened.
On Friday morning I woke from a vivid dream where I was standing on the Quai St Michel in front of the hotel where I usually stay, and I saw the cathedral engulfed in smoke and flame. I felt like it was the start of WWIII - some great doom was falling on France and the world. I told my partner about it, it disturbed me that much. Then on Monday afternoon the images came in, and I recognized them from my dream of four nights earlier.
I believe we are wired to receive information that is available through some type of energy grid that we have not yet been able to quantify to the satisfaction of out left hemispheric gate keeper and dictator.
It's worth noting that the gothic cathedrals of Europe have almost all been sited on ancient places of worship, places that have been chosen because of how they feel. Is it a coincidence that the great gothic Notre Dames of France have been laid out on the earth in the pattern of the constellation of Virgo, with the tiny Notre Dame de l'Epine in the position of the star Epi?
I don't have any answers, just questions. But I have learned to trust my gut.
AFF
I am also pretty sure that you will agree with me that the legal position of any particular religious group in any country is not ultimately of great importance to the individual believer, as long as they are allowed to practice their faith..
I should ,of course, have made it clear that what I was talking about was the place that the respective Christian communities have in the minds and hearts of the general populace even of those who have little or no connection with the particular religious communities.
Mea culpa ! (my mistake !)
"For ye have the poor with you always, and whensoever ye will ye may do them good: but me ye have not always."
ETA: Besides, who'd choose to be Judas?
Indeed it can't, but my contention is that the Catholic church is stuck in the past.
Claiming Notre Dame is the mother of us all in 2019 displays as much denial as a senior government minister claiming it isn't a cathedral.
Last Sunday a colleague of mine attended Sunday morning Mass in the central church of a coastal town in Normandy, a region with above average numbers of practising Catholics, with a population of around 14,000, and counted 60 people in attendance.
The Catholic church in France continuing to behave as if it's the only show in town, to the virtual exclusion of the State let alone other religions (beyond token recognition), is doing itself a disservice as well as suppressing the voices of other faiths and Christian confessions.
I know History is written by the winners and all that, and I’m not accusing anyone of actual malice, but this fact does rather seem to get glossed over. And yet it does explain quite a bit about the modern, secular French state. Why census data contains no information on religious affiliation, for example. We ain’t going there again.
1985 marked the 300th anniversary of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes:
This anniversary was marked by the issuing of this stamp.
Featuring the Huguenot cross, it bears the inscription "1685-1985, welcome of the Huguenots - tolerance - pluralism - brotherhood". Over 30 years on from first seeing this stamp, I still can't get over the barefaced rewriting of history it embodies. It's akin to labelling 1945 a victory for Germany, or Pearl Harbor a high point in America-Japan relations. I think French protestants have every reason to be touchy.
During Lent this year I have been playing with the idea of a pilgrimage.
A Christian settlement existed approximately on the site of the present St Machar's Cathedral, Old Aberdeen c580, and from there it has been suggested that the monks paddled upriver along the Don, establishing preaching stations. Churches were subsequently built on these sites. Many of these medieval churches now lie in ruins.
The North East Man and I have been visiting the churches by the banks of the Don, mostly by car, but I would like to walk the route at some point. I have been trying to imagine the route by which the Gospel was carried to the place on which the church in which we now worship was built.
I have felt a sense of "thin places" with the centuries all mashed up together. For example, St Fergus' is a ruin, with a Pictish carved cross inside the ruins, but has a current cemetery adjacent to it. The cemetery contains the graves of the Luftwaffe crews who were shot down as they attempted to bomb Aberdeen, adjacent to the graves of Allied troops. A small piece of Aberdeenshire which is forever Germany.
Two of the churches have carvings of the Pictish beast, which is my Ship avatar. Three of the churches have pre-Reformation carved stone Sacrament Houses (aumbries); two of which were carefully partially defaced during the Reformation. These places have seen worship in many forms; Celtic, Roman Catholic, Protestant, burials over many centuries, and some are now forgotten ruins and rarely visited, whilst others still have active congregations.
I'm not quite sure where I'm going with this, other than that I want to explore further and seek out other such places for contemplation and prayer. Trying to work out my own identity and theology of place.
Of course I accept that the French state and the French Catholic church have much to answer for in their persecution of Protestants. At the same time I am aware of religious persecution in many parts of Europe of those who did not follow the line proposed by the state , including the many hundreds of Catholics in England and above all in Ireland. I am aware of the religious persecutions on both sides within the German speaking states as well as the religious persecutions in Scotland between the Protestant monarchy and state and the differing and warring Protestant groups.
For those of us who are Christians, we realise and deplore those situations from the past and yes, amongst those who are the inheritors of the communities which were actively discriminated against there remains a memory of these difficult times.
Following Christ and living the Christian life is something dynamic, but there remains for all Christians also a sense that their religion is not something new and dynamic but also has a connection with the past. Many French Protestants, including those who belong to older 'established' bodies may take great comfort and pride in the sacrifices which their forefathers made.
We have to understand that for the majority of French people that past is one which is intimately involved with the Catholic church. The building which is known around the world, simply and easily recognisably, as Notre Dame is intimately bound up with the history, both good and bad, of the French state and obviously also with the Catholic Church. It is, however ,more than simply a building of the French state used for Catholic rites. It is an iconic building which tells us that, yes, the secular republic has a soul. Whether that 'soul' is the same as the 'immortal soul' of Christian teaching is another question.
I'm not sure how Mary anointing Jesus with expensive perfume before his death has any parallel to a historic building being restored.
I'm thinking that when I was younger, whenever I visited a cathedral, I saw them as tourist places, historical buildings. No sense of hallowedness. I'd never worshipped in one, and I would be visiting them as historical places, kind of similar to stately homes. Didn't associate them with my faith at all. I would get a sense of God's presence in the simple Baptist churches I went to, because I worshipped there and so I associated them with God and holiness. Once I'd started worshipping at C of E and Catholic churches, I got a sense of how those sort of services worked, and a sense of God there. And now, having worshipped in various old Catholic churches and cathedrals, now if I go to a cathedral, I do get a sense of it being a holy place to pray in. But to me that is my association I bring to it, rather than it being intrinsically hallowed. To me, it is in people, not place, where God is found.
But I also encountered this when visiting the famous C15th Zen rock garden of Roanji Temple in Kyoto. It is thought to represent infinity and it has a remarkable effect on people. They would walk up to it and immediately fall silent and start meditating before it for 15 minutes or longer. I've never seen that happen before.
For me, there is a sense that this is a spot where everything human has changed, but the eternal truths remain. In my church, there have been prayers for congregants fighting in the Second World War / the First World War / the Boer War / the Crimean War and no doubt many wars before that. Generations have been baptised, grown old and been buried.
We have raised money to ransom men captured by Barbary pirates, to buy grain for Ireland during the famine, to fund missions to India, comforts for troops and on and on.
We have argued, over and over and over again about music. The pews have changed from box pews, to semi-circular, to straight and now might be removed altogether. People have suffered from diseases now consigned to the history books. The nature of scandal has changed - we punished people for witchcraft in the C16th, breaking the Sabbath in the C18th and for ante-nuptial fornication in the C19th. People have worshipped in this spot for 1,400 years; their theology and forms of worship have changed beyond all recognition.
And here am I, where tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands have gone before, and I sing "We blossom and flourish like leaves on a tree, And wither, and perish, but naught changeth Thee."
I like that perspective.
It was a surprise to me that I felt the tangible sacredness of the prison chapel I went to, it certainly wasn't something I brought with me. (Quite the opposite, in fact, I don't look for such things. I'm more likely to have a shiver run down my spine when visiting churches, as I take in the memorial plaques.)
When I mentioned it, the chaplain said that people often remarked on the sense of holiness in the chapel. She thought that the place had been saturated by the prayers said in it for hundreds of years.
I'm here because my French Protestant ancestors fled religious violence; my many-times great-grandfather was orphaned by a mob, and escaped with his aunt and her family. I recommend a visit to the French Protestant Museum in La Rochelle to get a full picture.
We will always have endless human misery, and we must address it - but beauty, history, and the holy must be preserved.
Thinking about it, restoring old buildings doesn't seem to me to be preserving history - but making something new. Not that people shouldn't do it. The burning is part of the history though. Ruins left as they are seem more to be preserving history to me. But restoring means a building can have its function and appearance restored, which may be important. I think I see history being preserved more in people - memories, writings, traditions, etc. Though 'preserved' is not the word I would use - I see it as more fluid, more alive, because history is told through people's perspectives, understood through people's perspectives, and perspectives and understanding differ from person to person, from era to era.
Rossweisse, Huguenot refugees began arriving in the Cape Colony, South Africa, after the Edict of Fontainebleau in 1685. Many of them settled in the valley known as Franschhoek (French Corner) where they established wine farms and married into Afrikaner Calvinist settler families, unfortunately also adapting to the local practice of slave labour. The Huguenot Monument and museum attracts many French tourists each year.
Religious history, its monuments and institutions along with artworks and magnificent music always connotes ambiguity and contradiction...
Europeans are not the only people to persecute others who do not share their own form of faith nor the same ethnic origins, others have done and continue to do the same.
For those of us who do have European ancestry I have just been reading a book written (in French) by a White Russian who had escaped from Stalinist Russia by jumping ship in Singapore,at that time a British colony. It details the author's slow journey back to European 'civilisation'. Without meaning at all to be racist it tells of what was simply considered to be the superiority of the white race in the colony. It speaks of the same thing in the British colony of Ceylon, the Portuguese colony of Macao and the French colony of Djibouti. The author while passing through Rome on his way home reminds us of the failure of the Italians in their invasion of Eritrea in the 1890s (to be upsides with other European colonial powers) and while not directly supporting the Italian invasion of Abbysinia in the 1930s indicates that at least the 'white' man had got his own back for the defeat of the 1890s.
Certainly in Europe we have moved on at least officially from what were the accepted opinions of these days.
More generally, I'd like to know on what you are basing your assertion that the majority of French people are Catholic in any meaningful sense. I live in a bastion of the Catholic bourgeoisie (the 15th arrondissement of Paris) and even here this just doesn't describe people I know. I mentioned earlier that census information in France specifically excludes religious affiliation. I am also highly resistant to this idea because it seems to me to suggest that "proper" French people are white and don't have immigrant backgrounds. Consider another, rather different locus of French national pride: our World Cup winning football team, the majority of whom come from immigrant families. When you talk about "most French people", why do I suspect you are not thinking of Kylian Mbappé?