Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee....
-Traditional Marian devotion in the Latin Church
Never ascribe to wickedness or malevolence what can be accounted for by negligence, incompetence, or stupidity.
-Hanlon’s Razor, variously attributed, in various forms
O, Solomon, I have surpassed thee!
-Justinian, at the dedication of the Church of the Holy Wisdom (Hagia Sophia) in Constantinople, December 24, 563
À toutes les Gloires de la France. (To all the glories of France)
-inscription on the architrave over the portico of the Palais De Versailles
Summary: It has been two days now since a fire in the ancient roof timbers of Notre Dame de Paris did what has been described as “catastrophic” damage to the 850-year-old Cathedral of Paris, located on the Île de la Cité, the iconic, or may we say the cardinal, church of France, of ancient France, of Catholic France, of France the conservator and curator of our common Roman civilizational heritage. As the embers cool, and personnel from the national government, the regional government, and the city government of Paris can venture in to the charred, yet still holy space to take stock, we may begin to acquire a sense of the extent of the terrible loss to the civilization of the Greco-Roman West. Yet at the same time, this calamity may have recalled France to her Gallican Catholic identity.
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The French word for anguish is “angoisse.” Monday, the entire world received a gut check and a lesson in helpless anguish. As we watched from our devices of every kind, we can see an existential disaster unfolding before us as the Cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris lit up in flames that could be seen all over the Cité and through much of adjacent Paris.
Watching a precious symbol of Paris and of France burn, powerless to do anything to stop the flames, hoping against hope that the Paris Fire Department, les pompiers braves, would be able to knock down the fire, groups of Parisians, come together in that kind of horror you just can’t turn your eyes from, spontaneously began to sing the words of the Ave Maria, one of the oldest Marian hymns of the Latin Church:
Je vous salue, Marie,
pleine de grâce:
le Seigneur est avec vous;
vous êtes bénie entre toutes les femmes,
et Jésus, le fruit de vos entrailles,
est béni.
Sainte Marie, Mère de Dieu,
priez pour nous, pauvres pécheurs,
maintenant et à l'heure de notre mort.
Hail Mary, full of grace,
The Lord is with thee.
Blessed art thou amongst women,
And blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.
Holy Mary, Mother of God,
Pray for us sinners,
Now and at the hour of our death.
Watching Parisians watching the beating heart of their city in flames, knowing that neither we nor they could alter the progress of the catastrophe, was enough to move to the tears the least tender; and to impel to prayer the most incredulous, and to cause many of us participating vicariously in the disaster from half a world away to fall out of touch with our own composure. Like those of the watchers on the banks of the Seine, our hearts, too, were fractured by what we had seen.
But now, two days later, as the last of the embers dies, and as various French officials begin to enter the damaged, yet still sacred, space dedicated to the Holy Mother of God to try to ascertain the extent of the damage, it falls to us to follow the lead of the Paris Public Prosecutor, who is satisfied at this time that the evidence points to the fire having been an accident. Or, to apply the words of Hanlon’s Razor, (an offshoot of Occam’s Razor) we should never ascribe to wickedness or malevolence what can be accounted for by negligence, incompetence, or stupidity.
Notwithstanding the free-bubbling conspiratorial afflatus emerging from certain malodorous corners of the Internet, we should not lay this catastrophe at the door of ISIL/Daesh, other Islamic jihadists, or even at the door of right-wing provocateurs from the front mationale seeking to fabricate on the Île de la Cité some kind of 2019 iteration of the Reichstag fire.
What do we think? What do we know? What can we prove?
Until and unless substantial further information is developed that would permit us to envisage the hypothesis of some kind of malevolent actor having been involved, we should perhaps draw a first approximation conclusion that if any human actor was involved in this disaster, the conflagration may have been the result of nothing more and nothing less then an overheated power tool coming into close proximity with one of the 800-plus-year-old roof timbers in the so-called forest in the attic above the vaulted ceiling of the Cathedral.
After eight centuries in an attic with little to no climate control of any kind, the so-called forest above the ceiling of Notre-Dame should have been a nightmare of any member of any fire service anywhere in the world. Ancient, tinder dry, possibly riddled with rot, and essentially inaccessible to first responders, the roof timbers of Notre-Dame de Paris were, to use a cliché almost as old as the timbers themselves, a disaster waiting to happen.
And happen it did. Notre-Dame is one of the most important churches in all of the Roman West. Not only is it perhaps par excellence one of the quintessential Gothic masterpieces of the High Middle Ages, as well as being one of the great repositories of French art and culture, but it is also, in virtue of its chapter’s custodianship of such relics as a piece of the True Cross and of the Crown of Thorns which, in tradition, encircled the “sacred head, sore wounded” of our Suffering Savior, an integral part of the Deposit of Faith of the Latin Church, that is to say, the Roman, Anglican, Lutheran, and Protestant churches of the West.
Notre-Dame is not merely a sacred space, but a space rich with historical associations for France and for Europe, as well as for the United States. In 1804, Napoleon Bonaparte was crowned Emperor of the French by Pope Pius VII. On August 26, 1944, the Cathedral was the venue for a Te Deum service giving thanks for the Allied liberation of Paris from four years of Nazi occupation. Though German snipers within the Cathedral attempted to disrupt the service, they were not successful. The sheer physical courage that day of Gen. Charles De Gaulle, who, notwithstanding the bullets, made his way unflinchingly up the center aisle of the nave to his seat in the choir has become one of the glories of France that will never be forgotten.
And because Notre-Dame is so integral to the life of Paris and to the life of France, it was hardly surprising that Pres. Emanuel Macron should have announced on the very evening of the fire that the great church would be rebuilt. Already, French billionaires and millionaires, The Very People whom that Tiresome Little Man Bernard Sanders loves to belabor, are stepping up to commit hundreds of millions of euros to the reconstruction effort. Almost €1bn has already been pledged.
We may not know how long the reconstruction will take, but whoever is President of the French Republic when the work is done, may be excused a little frisson of pride, and even the temptation to look up at the soaring vaults of the nave, or to step out from the south transept, take a short walk to look at the rebuilt spire and roof of Our Lady’s church and say quietly the words of Justinian when the rebuilt Church of the Holy Wisdom in Constantinople was re-consecrated in the year 563: “O Solomon, I have surpassed thee!”
Yet, to the extent that the 850-year-old Cathedral church of Our Lady of Paris is reconstructed, the reconstruction cannot be allowed to be “true to period.” Yesterday’s conflagration ought to be a reminder to officials of the French Republic, which is the owner of Notre-Dame de Paris, that 21st-century technology must be deployed to serve the needs of a 12th-century Cathedral.
The roof trusses, installed 800+ years ago and constructed of oak and chestnut, gave good service across eight centuries, but the fire danger implicit in the use of wood structural members for such a building as Notre-Dame, which was and will be again, God willing, an active church, after all, militates in favor of rebuilding the roof using non-flammable lightweight steel alloy struts and trusses. Moreover, the authorities should envisage the hypothesis of installing an inert gas or water vapor system in the attic as a fire suppression strategy. Sprinklers should not be used lest the weight of water collapse the vaulting and send it tumbling down upon worshipers a hundred-plus feet below.
However, as much as Notre-Dame and the other great Gothic cathedrals scattered across France represent a large part of the glories of France, they are also in need of examination and possible retrofitting against the now manifest danger of fire. Whether one is speaking of Albi, Amiens, Beauvais, Bourges, Chartres, Laon, Lyon, Noyon, Orléans, Reims, Rouen, St. Denis, Senlis, Sens, Strasbourg, Tours, or any of numerous other Gothic edifices within The Hexagon that is France, one is necessarily speaking of structures that may well have scores or even hundreds of years of deferred maintenance.
Notre-Dame, with its ancient wooden roof, is not dissimilar to the Hōryuji temple complex in Nara, Japan. Indeed, the wooden buildings in the Hōryuji complex are said to be among the oldest still existing wooden structures in the world. One of them, the Kondō, constructed in the third quarter of the seventh century, suffered severe fire damage in 1949, and was reconstructed. The damage to the Kondō, and that to Notre-Dame de Paris, stands out as a reminder to us that civilization in both the Sinosphere and in the Greco-Roman West is an ongoing work, an act of faith in ourselves and in our capacity to leave lasting achievements to our posterity.
If we have wept for the damage to the church dedicated to the Holy Mother of God, it is because, as participants in the civilization of the Greco-Roman West, we believe that our Greco-Roman civilization is worth cherishing. When the great bells in the towers of Notre-Dame tolled to mark the Liberation of Paris in 1944, or the terrorist outrages of September 11, 2001, they reminded us that we belong to the great enterprise of civilization.
If the catastrophe of Notre-Dame helps to remind the French, the people of the Francophonie, and the people of the civilized world that France, Christian France, Catholic France, civilized France, France même, remains an integral part of the radically inclusive Christian civilization of the Greco-Roman West, then perhaps we may take a minute pearl of consolation from a charred and distinctly rough oyster, as France, even if only for a fleeting moment, comes again in contact with her Gallican-Catholic identity.
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Paul S. Marchand is a lawyer and former Cathedral City city councilmember. He lives in Cathedral City and practices law in neighboring Rancho Mirage. Like so many people with Francophone names, he mourns for Notre Dame de Paris, but as a Christian, he believes that by the power of the Resurrection, Notre-Dame, God willing, will be again the beating heart of Paris and of France.
