THE TRAGEDY AT THE BEGINNING OF HOLY WEEK
«With Notre-Dame a part of us burns»: he said as much, according to news agencies, French President Emmanuel Macron during the devastating fire that destroyed the Paris cathedral, symbol of the Gothic architectural style.
What Macron said is undoubtedly true and therefore, at least in theory, shareable, if only it didn't come from a leading exponent of that European political and ideological class that has contributed more than ever in recent decades to setting fire not only to the supporting pillars of Western civilization, but his own spirit.
The historical-artistic tragedy that took place among the fires of Notre-Dame, Indeed, can serve as a useful suggestion to reflect on human and cultural tragedy that is consuming from within, like the flames between the wooden beams of the transept and the nave of the famous Parisian church, the entire Western civilization.
It would be more appropriate to ask, Therefore, why cry on the blackened stones that will remain at Notre-Dame after a few hours of intense and indomitable fire, if you have time, with a violence far superior to that of the largest pyre imaginable, and without any internal or external disturbance, you are notThe West seems to have hastened to incinerate the spirit that those same stones have carefully built.
Notre Dame, it's time to remember, it was the emblem of the Gothic style, that is, of the cultural peak of European civilization of the 12th-13th centuries, that is, of those centuries defined as medieval, often with an unfairly derogatory meaning that derives from an ideological vision, that is, middle centuries, devoid of intelligence, and as such dark, placed between the greatness of classical antiquity and the new age of reason which established itself starting from the Renaissance, reaching its presumed apotheosis in the era of the French Enlightenment.
Leaving aside the historical fact that the French Revolution, that is, the socio-political concretization of Enlightenment ideas, he intentionally burned multiple churches and monasteries (and human lives) than random adverse fate has ever done, it is good to remember how, Instead, not only is rationality not an exclusive product of the Renaissance or the Enlightenment, but it is also a typical connotation of the so-called "Middle Ages".
Nikolaj Berdjaev highlighted this point well, Indeed, that «the Renaissance already existed in the depths of the Middle Ages», thus demonstrating that that vision of history which not only divides the different eras of humanity into watertight compartments is not at all realistic, but what, according to the paradigms of a self-referential secularized messianism, awaits a future era of enlightenment that should redeem humanity from its supposedly dark past.
Notre-Dame Cathedral, Indeed, it is precisely the architectural expression of the rational capacity of humanity in the 12th and 13th centuries, not only from a strictly engineering point of view, requiring such an imposing building complex calculations and technical measures which in their essence are not secondary or dissimilar to the current ones, but also and above all from a human point of view.
The Gothic style, Indeed, with its verticalisations, its spiers, its polystyle colonnades, its play of light through the polychrome windows, its flying buttresses, and all its other stylistic features, constitutes the architectural manifestation of the human response to the divine appeal which is celebrated in Christianity in which it is no longer man who seeks God, but God what, incarnating, goes in search of man.
The Gothic style explains that relationship with transcendence that makes man a person as a creature constituted in the image and likeness of a personal God with whom he communicates in the sacred space traced by the naves of the cathedral.
The Gothic style, In the end, reveals all the profound finitude of man who, anchored by his own nature in the world of this world, uses the most solid tools of creation, the stones, to organize them in a concretely rational way in order to elevate oneself by projecting oneself with the spirit into the beyond and coming into contact with that divinity to which one recognizes oneself filially and freely subjected.
All principles and places of meaning irrevocably condemned to the stake by that modern age so focused on the solipsism of the individual, on the self-referentiality of the individual, on the materialism of satisfying market needs, on the radical denial of transcendence, comes the motto of Voltaire “Crush the Infamous!», that is, “destroy the infamous”, that is, Christianity and all its symbols.
With the hope that the sacrifice of an entire monumental church was not in vain, in the feeble and flickering light of the still burning embers of the rubble of Notre-Dame, some questions arise in conclusion.
Why, instead of artificially reconstructing the walls of a cathedral symbol of Western spirituality, like the latter razed to the ground, do not undertake the much more difficult one, but important spiritual and human reconstruction of the West in general and of Europe in particular?
Why worry about the incineration of a symbol like the Notre-Dame cathedral which occurs in a historical era like the current one in which in certain countries, like in Holland for example, churches are "reconverted" into pubs, shopping centers, hotels and restaurants?
Why languish around the smoking remains of Notre-Dame without turning our gaze and thought to what Notre-Dame actually is far beyond the mere materiality of its structure?
Why be moved by the destruction of a symbol like Notre-Dame without also regretting the previous and more serious destruction of what Notre-Dame actually represents?
Why, In the end, attempt to extinguish the imposing embers of Notre-Dame with hypocritical tears an older and different fire, son of the ancestral and atavistic primordial flame of pride, translated today into ideological and resolutely anti-Christian and anti-human schematisms, in a much more brutal way, in general indifference, he ferociously burned its meaning and symbolism, which held her upright and gloriously soaring towards the sky, well before the banal material fire consumed its solid body?
source – https://www.loccidentale.it/articoli/146976/brucia-notre-dame-come-lintera-civilta-occidentale