In Graham Greene’s retrospective Ways of Escape, he takes the time between stories of smoking opium in Vietnam and visiting brothels on Caribbean islands to talk about his friend Evelyn Waugh. In the wake of Greene’s novel A Burnt Out Case, everyone was worried about Greene’s loss of faith. Waugh wrote his friend a note inquiring what in the world was going on, and as an older man Greene looks back on the correspondence and muses on Waugh as a man and an author.

On Waugh’s inner conflict:

There was always in Evelyn a conflict between the satirist and the romantic. I suppose a satirist is always to some extent a romantic: but he doesn’t usually express his romanticism. Perhaps romanticism was a weak point in Evelyn’s life and work, and in the end it helped to kill him. He had too-great expectations; too-great expectations of his fellow creatures, and too-great expectations even of his Church. I think the old expression “a broken heart” comes near to the truth, when one thinks of his reaction to the changes in the liturgy of the Catholic Church.

On Waugh’s development as a writer:

In his early books he himself was thoroughly enjoying what he satirized. Decline and Fall, Evelyn’s first book, which I admire as much as any—must have read it half a dozen times at least—is, to me, pure fun. So is the less successful Vile Bodies. He made fun out of the “bright young things” of the twenties, but he was one of them himself. Perhaps with Black Mischief…the serious satire begins to be visible below the fun. In A Handful of Dust, his most painful book, there is no fun at all.

On Brideshead Revisited:

When [Evelyn] had written to me that the only excuse for [Brideshead] was Nissen huts and Spam and the blackout I had accepted that criticism—until the other day when I reread all his books, and to my astonishment joined the ranks of those who find Brideshead his best, even though it is his most romantic.

On The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold:

In Pinfold he draws a character study of himself. It reminds one a little of Freud bravely doing his own self-analysis…but in this strange book he has left out all his fine qualities: physical courage, private generosity, loyalty to friends. Pinfold, I think, shows him technically almost at his most perfect.

On Waugh’s legendary rudeness:

I was for many years puzzled by his reputation for rudeness and cruelty—I must have known him well for nearly a dozen years without seeing any example to justify it. I had even stayed with him several times in the country (a feat regarded as extraordinary by some of his friends) and had seen only an excellent and witty host, one who disguised his own inner torment in drollery rather than disturb his guest.

On Waugh’s generosity

Those who have built Evelyn up as a sort of sacred monster have left out the other side; they have ignored the man who gave up from work which was essential to him time to stay with the dying and no longer amusing Ronald Knox in the kind of hotel and the kind of resort he hated, who attended the deathbed of his friend Alfred Duggan and against all obstacles brought him the help he needed. When I come to die, I shall wish he were beside me, for he would give me no easy comfort.

I’ve been spending a lot of time recently with Gertrud von le Fort’s exploration of feminism in her book The Eternal Woman. It took me a while to read it because I kept digressing as I followed the line of her thought. For instance, and relative to all of you as writers and artists, in the first chapter she touches on the role of art and symbol in understanding our contingency as created beings. “Only an age profoundly bewildered or misled in its metaphysical instincts could attribute the idea of eternity…to a creature.” The danger, she writes, is that to misunderstand our relation to eternity would be to annihilate our humanity by profoundly misunderstanding ourselves at a fundamental level. Finding our true selves and avoiding this error, le Fort says, is the impulse behind religious surrender, love, and exploring the meaning of death.

It seems to me that one of the roles of an artist is to humble us. When we stand before a Titian or hear a Victoria setting for the Mass, it is with gratitude at the mystery in which we are immersed, a mystery that has no final depths, that moves like a traveler through our heart. If our ultimate metaphysical significance is grasped only in our relation to the divine, then the world is analogical and everything finds its meaning through reference to God. In other words, if anything is beautiful, it is because it reflects, through analogical participation, the God who is Beauty. Le Fort develops this line of reasoning in order to show the eternal value of the feminine, but also gestures toward how it applies it to art.

“It is only great art in its supreme moments of inspiration that is capable of proclaiming under a transitory form the things that are unchanging,” she writes. This, precisely, is why art humbles us. To encounter great art is to encounter eternity, to savor it in the marrow of our bones. The form itself, however, is by definition transitory and veiled, making clear that we participate in such holy things as invited guests and not by right.

Le Fort goes on to argue that this is why all great art is birthed of Catholic culture. It is the Church that straddles eternity and maintains, “supratemporal aspects.” To scratch to the surface of great art is to “tread the ground of great Catholic dogma.”

Art stands for us. It humbles while it simultaneously exalts. It sets us in our proper relationship on the horizon of eternity as it veils and reveals. If art stands for us, we must stand for art.

Upon beginning to re-read Gene Wolfe’s New Sun books, they’re significantly better even than I remembered. I first read them about ten years ago before I was Catholic and clearly I wasn’t prepared for them, because although I remember enjoying them, I missed how full of enchantment they are. The trick that Wolfe pulls off is to place the novels some millions of years into the future on a planet Earth that is ruinous and rotting under the weak red light of a dying sun. Technology has waxed and waned presumably countless times between that future time and ours, and the beauty of science-fiction is that what might seem magic to us is actually the result of technology. Further, what seems at first blush to be secular science is revealed to be theology, or sacred science.

Last week, I referenced Wolfe’s opinion that Dante’s Divine Comedy is actually sci-fi. He says, “Humanists would say the Divine Comedy is fantasy, but they are wrong. It is SF, based on the soft science of theology. Theology has just as much right to that word science as sociology and the rest do.”

Here’s an example of how this works in New Sun. This shouldn’t spoil the book if you haven’t read it yet, but I hope it inspires everyone to read it because these books are an absolute gem. In New Sun, Father Inire, the mysterious sage of the House Absolute, displays and reveals his room of octagonal mirrors to a young noble named Domnina. Wolfe writes,

She realized when she saw them that the wall of the octagonal enclosure through which she passed faced another mirror. In fact, all the others were mirrors. The light of the blue-white lamp was caught by them all and reflected from one to another as boys might pass silver balls, interlacing and intertwining in an interminable dance. In the center, the fish flickered to and fro, a thing formed, it seemed, by the convergence of the light.

“Here you see him,” Father Inire said. “The ancients, who knew this process at least as well as we and perhaps better, considered the Fish the least important and the most common of the inhabitants of specula. With their false belief that the creatures they summoned were ever present in the depths of the glass, we need not concern ourselves. In time, they turned to a more serious question: By what means may travel be effected when the point of departure is at an astronomical distance from the place of arrival?”

In explaining the science of faster-than-light travel, Father Inire says that when the energy source is coherent and the mirrors are optically perfect, “the orientation of the wave fronts is the same because the image is the same. Since nothing can exceed the speed of light in our universe, the accelerated light leaves it and enters another. When it slows down, it reenters ours – naturally at another place.” It sounds like mystical nonsense, but remember, Father Inire is drawing on a half-forgotten piece of technology that developed sometime between our eras. It may seem magic to us, but it is, in fact, science. It’s the key to faster-than-light travel. The hologram (the fish), with the correct equipment, is in actuality a real creature piercing through from another dimension. In the distant future, humanity at some point figured out how to leap into these dimensions and back into ours as a way to quickly travel vast distances.

Father Inire references, “the ancients.” This is where Wolfe can be so very fascinating. The reference is to the ancient practice of catopromancy, the use of divining mirrors in ancient Greece and Rome by seers called specularii. Wolfe has linked what was considered magic with a future technological advancement. Science and magic are indistinguishable. Wolfe doesn’t want to stop there, though, because theology is science. The natural explanation is developed by and completed by the supernatural.

Here’s what I think is going on. All through the novel, Severian is being pulled along by forces that seem out of his control, and he encounters variations on the same theme. Events occur that seem vaguely familiar. I would call them echoes, or waves of light. Much like Father Inire’s mirrors, the echoes build up through the narrative and finally birth a solid reality.

Severian himself lives his life in a sort of metaphysical mirror-room in which sacramentality is coming to fruition, finally bursting into full bloom. This is the meaning of the journey he’s on, the echoes pierce through into another reality and return to ours with newfound solidity. He is finding himself, drawing newfound powers and virtues that draw on a higher dimension and taking on a more and more firm reality. It’s a picture of grace completing nature, of sacramentality, the Word become Flesh.

The genius of Wolfe is to write it in such a way that the concept is deeply spiritual but the miracle is mediated through the language of technology and magic. In fact, it’s theology the whole time.

Gene Wolfe, one of the best and most under-rated writers around – and, apparently, the inventor of the machine that makes Pringles – died on Palm Sunday. His Book of the New Sun is a challenging and beautiful read, focusing on the journey of an ex-torturer named Severian as he travels through the vast wasteland of a dying earth eons into the future. I read it about ten years ago and am desperate to read it again, a rare desire on my part since I re-read very few books.

One of Wolfe’s biggest fans is Neil Gaiman, who tells about meeting his hero:

I was as impressed and delighted by the Book of the New Sun as I was intimidated by it. Wolfe’s use of language, the grand sweep of his story, the way he used science fiction to illuminate ideas and people and to stretch my mind in ways it had never been stretched before, the way he played with memory and gave us a perfectly reliable unreliable narrator – all these things thrilled me…

I was a young journalist, and I asked for and was given an interview with Wolfe. I do not know what I expected, but whatever I imagined the author of those glittering, dangerous stories to have been, I was not expecting the genial gentleman I met.

Not only did Wolfe have a reputation as being a quiet, humble genius, he was also a committed Catholic who converted at the behest of his wife during their engagement. He made the faith his own and it shows in his work how deeply a Catholic worldview impressed itself upon him. Jeet Heer at The New Republic has an excellent write-up I highly recommend. After calling Wolfe, “The Proust of science fiction,” he comments that, like Flannery O’Connor and James Joyce, “[Wolfe] wrote analogical fiction: stories that worked at many levels as they fused the literal, the metaphoric, and the philosophic into the same narrative.” Perhaps this is why one reader describes New Sun as, “a Star Wars–style space opera penned by G. K. Chesterton in the throes of a religious conversion.”

New Sun is a novel for our disordered age. The distant future Wolfe foresaw descended upon us far more quickly and chaotically than anticipated, or perhaps it’s simply that the future is the same as the present which is the same as the past. In every age man is beset by evil. Severian was raised in the Guild of the Torturers from his early age and trained to become a passionless, disinterested killing machine. He worked without morals, and yet his disordered, stunted heart maintains a glimmer of humanity. His journey is that of a growing awareness of virtue and transcendent faith. His journey might even be compared with that of Dante through purgatory.

A torturer learns the imitation of Christ. Wolfe himself notes,

It has been remarked thousands of times that Christ died under torture. Many of us have read so often that he was “a humble carpenter” that we feel a little surge of nausea on seeing the words yet again. But no one ever seems to notice that the instruments of torture were wood, nails, and a hammer; that the man who built the cross was undoubtedly a carpenter too; that the man who hammered in the nails was as much a carpenter as a soldier, as much a carpenter as a torturer. Very few seem even to have noticed that although Christ was a “humble carpenter,” the only object we are specifically told he made was not a table or a chair, but a whip.

I’m going to read Book of the New Sun very soon. I hope you all will read it with me and marvel at the talent and craftsmanship of a man who was a master at the art of writing. Even if you can’t read it soon, take a minute to offer up a prayer for a brother Catholic who is now on a heroic journey of his own.

 

PS Here’s something controversial for all of your who like to argue about the definitions of sci-fi and fantasy, a parting gift from Gene Wolfe:

Should there be Catholic SF? Absolutely! Suppose we change that question just a little and say, “Should there be Catholic art?” Answer NO, and a lot of the world’s greatest art vanishes. Humanists would say the Divine Comedy is fantasy, but they are wrong. It is SF, based on the soft science of theology. Theology has just as much right to that word science as sociology and the rest do.

Guest post by Jeffrey Wald.

Count Tolstoy’s magnum opus War and Peace can be read on a variety of planes: historical fiction of the Napoleonic Wars; explication of Tolstoy’s theory of human history; exploration into “The Russian Soul”; etc. But perhaps the loudest narrative thread is the author’s clear disdain for Napoleon himself. One can imagine the venerable Count sitting up one day and deciding: I am going to destroy the pathetic notion that we (yes even we Russian victors) have that Napoleon was somehow a “great” man, even if it takes me 1296 pages to do it!

And so about three-quarters of the way through his masterpiece, we readers find ourselves in Moscow circa 1812. The French army has effectively been defeated. They are rushing from Russia as fast as their weary legs will take them. And Napoleon is with his army, fleeing right alongside them, or rather in front of them, until Berezina. There, he puts on his fur coat, gets into a sledge, and gallops off alone, abandoning his comrades. With scorn and disgust, Tolstoy describes this flight for what it is: cowardice, selfishness, and “the final degree of baseness, which every child is taught to be ashamed of.”

And yet, Tolstoy goes on to write, with increasing scorn and disgust, historians refuse to call a spade a spade and acknowledge Napoleon’s cowardice. Why? Because it does not fit with their notion of Napoleon’s “greatness,” and therefore his flight must be justified as something great and marked by genius:

Then, when it is no longer possible to stretch the so-elastic threads of historical discourse any further, when an action clearly contradicts all that mankind calls good and even just, historians resort to the saving notion of greatness. It is as if greatness excludes the possibility of the measure of good and bad. For the great man there is no bad. There is no horror that can be laid to the blame of someone who is great.

Is Tolstoy correct? Do we give the “great” person a pass? The genius, the inventor, the business giant, the political heavyweight – do we judge them by some extrinsic measure of good and bad, or by the vagaries of their supposed greatness? Do we at times excuse horrific behavior claiming the actor somehow exists outside the bounds of normal human conduct?

Tolstoy certainly thinks so, and cuts to the core of our weakness in doing so: “And it never enters anyone’s head that the recognition of a greatness not measurable by the measure of good and bad is only a recognition of one’s own insignificance and immeasurable littleness.”

Ouch! Every second of my life that I’ve spent thinking about Paris Hilton, or Prince William, or the like, now seems an utter waste.

And yet, our times perhaps suffers from the opposite extreme of Tolstoy’s. A deep skepticism pervades the air. Rather than excuse behavior claiming the person is “great,” we now adjudge greatness to no one. If good and bad are relative, can anyone be called good? Can anyone be called great? Is there such a thing as sanctity?

For Tolstoy, the answer is “yes,” there is at least One who can be called great, the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. He is the Measure and the Measurer. And accordingly, the two extremes, hailing greatness where it is not and denying greatness where it is, are removed by Him. In Christ, the plague of relativism dies, for, as Tolstoy writes, “with the measures of good and bad given us by Christ, nothing is immeasurable.”

Jeffrey Wald is an attorney, husband, and father of three boys. His short fiction, poetry, and reviews have previously appeared in a variety of print and online periodicals including Touchstone, Stinkwaves Magazine, Summit Ave Review, Whistling Shade, Philosophy Now, Light, and Plainsongs.

Guest post by Paul Burnham.

I didn’t believe in Mary in the same way my Catholic friends did. My own faith accommodated her immaculate conception and her divine errand. There was room for that. But I didn’t believe in her intercession—not on my behalf.

And I dismissed her apparitions. I knew of these—in Lourdes and Zaragoza and on a hillside in Mexico City, where I had once witnessed a procession of pilgrims, penitentes, ambulating on their knees toward a shrine built to Our Lady of Guadalupe. These apparitions were fantastic and incredible accounts, and far from my own experience; so I dismissed them. I remained chained to an anchoring bias, to the dogma of my initial exposure to faith and belief. I resisted her.

Then, in a community art studio in Montana, her image appeared to me—arms extended—ready to embrace me, ready to forgive. She had been in the periphery of my belief all along, where she had waited for me, patiently, until I was ready. How could I resist her any longer?

My daughter was there, and her friend, and the studio manager. But they didn’t receive the vision. In this Damascene moment, only I heard the clatter of scales falling from my eyes. I held the vision close. I kept it secret.

Two weeks earlier, I had brought my daughter and her friend to the art studio—to glaze bowls or cups or other practical articles. We were there in early October. The studio had seasonal ceramic skulls—an inch tall and of pure white clay, dried and ready to glaze—to observe the Day of the Dead.

I was bored. The girls were chattering and painting, absorbed in a world separate from mine. I picked up one of the little skulls and painted it. Dark blue—azul—the same blue I had seen on Madero Street in Mexico City, on the exterior walls of the Casa de los Azulejos. The blue of an evening sky. Light enough to still see the silhouettes of swallows crisscrossing high above the street. Dark enough for stars to appear.

I painted the entire skull with this blue glaze, and the teeth white and the gums red and the eyes lemon-drop-yellow, with tiny black pupils. On the back I painted a multi-colored sun. I imagined this sun—El Sol—burning the back of this poor man’s head for all the years he worked in the maguey fields. El Sol was now quenched by an evening sky, cool and refreshing. This man—this campesino—would at last have peace and rest.

The skull went into the kiln with the bowls and cups and pitchers and all the useful things visitors had made that week. 2000 degrees Fahrenheit. We went back the next week to collect our shiny items. But the studio staff couldn’t find my skull. Sometimes these small pieces show up later. Another week passed. They called me at home. They had found my skull. Not sure how we missed it. It survived a second firing.

Ceramic glazes can be unpredictable, temperamental. The kiln’s fire can also produce varied results. But the blue was just what I had hoped—the blue of Madero Street. Azul. The gums and teeth were perfect too: blood-red and white, smiling. But the pupils had spread, and the eyes were not the intended yellow. They had turned black—aboriginal—like those of a fresco-God from the interior of an Aztec tomb. No matter; my laborer in the maguey fields was finally at rest—no longer tormented by the burning sun—content and smiling in his celestial home.

I turned the skull in my hand. Another part was different than I had intended; the sun was entirely gone. The intense heat of the kiln—maybe in the second firing—had transfigured El Sol into another divine being. Walking through that dark blue sky was Mary. María. All alone. Our Lady of Solitude. María de la Soledad.

The glaze had run down the back of the skull, and the unmistakable image of Mary had appeared. Tender. Pure. Arms extended in a gesture of generosity and compassion. Yellow rays shot from behind her—a radial halation centered on her heart. She moved toward me, floating in the blue sky. I had not expected her here—here in the center of my own narrow perspective, so far from my own experience. Yet here she was standing in front of me, on the back of this little ceramic skull: María de la Soledad.

Only then did I remember I had seen her image on one other occasion. Or I may have seen more than her image. But I didn’t recognize her then—I resisted—and only after three decades of my own perfidy was that vision given back to me.

On that other occasion, I was passing through Mexico City—not far from that hillside where she had appeared to a young Indian man, Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin, four hundred fifty years before. A large plaza and basilica mark the place—the same shrine where I had seen her devotees kneeling. Some had walked many miles to worship. Some had gone to their knees for the last few hundred yards, until the fabric and skin over their tibias wore away and their blood ran on the black basalt cobblestones. I had dismissed her there, too—in that plaza. But my transgression was greater than a mere dismissal; I had resisted her. I had felt her there, and I had denied my feelings—the worst of all crimes.

An hour’s walk south of that basilica, in a dark bus station, I found her. The sun was rising on the waking city, and the mercurial morning light only allowed brief glimpses of people and signs and movement there. Many years of diesel exhaust had etched the concrete walls grey and black. These walls reflected little of the sunlight that found its way into the bowels of the station.

In that subdued light I found the sign I had been seeking: a black slate board above the bus stall, and on it, written in pink chalk, the destination: CUAUTLA.

The bus’s engine was running, belching black exhaust from a polished chrome pipe. The acrid fumes burned my eyes and nostrils. I blinked, dispersing the tears so I could see the way forward. And as I blinked, a ray of sunlight fell across my face. The spreading of watery film over my eyes refracted and scattered the light for a moment. I saw a man standing next to the bus—toward the front—inviting me to approach. I moved alongside the rumbling and snorting beast, back to front, carefully, as though walking next to a horse that had never smelled my hands. He greeted me and I offered my ticket. He wore grey slacks and a navy blue jacket, with a faded patch over his heart: conductor.

A thin ray of sunlight, nearly horizontal, passed over us and reflected off the windows of an exiting bus. The reflection illuminated a woman standing next to us. I hadn’t noticed her before, though she stood close enough that I could have touched her hand. She wore a white blouse, embroidered with red and yellow and blue flowers, and a navy blue skirt—ankle-length—trimmed with red and white bands at the hem. Her leather sandals were light buckskin, almost gold in color, and she had bright ribbons in her hair. The exiting bus disappeared, and with it the reflected sunlight. My eyes adjusted to the darkness again, and I could hardly see the woman any longer. Had I not seen her before, I doubt I would have noticed her in that moment. She stood still and appeared thin, slight, almost transparent.

The man inspected my ticket, punched it, and invited me to board. I found a window seat that allowed a view of the man and woman outside. The darkness dissipated as my eyes adjusted to the dim light.

When the last passenger entered the bus, the woman turned to the man—I could see her more clearly now. The man bowed his head and closed his eyes. The woman removed a rosary from around her neck and gently placed it over the man’s head and arranged it on his neck, so the crucifix rested in the center of his chest. With her right hand, she touched her own forehead and began. I watched her lips move—En nombre del padre—The man bowed more deeply—y del hijo—She touched her breast—y del Espíritu Santo—She touched her left and right shoulders. She then produced a small cup, and a wooden aspergillum with a short brush on one end. The man raised his head and opened his eyes, looking straight up at the ceiling. The woman wetted the brush in the cup and flicked holy water onto his face and into his open eyes—que los ojos vean—He raised his hands, palms together, as though praying. She flicked the water again, onto his hands this time—y que las manos conduzcan bien en el camino. She lifted the rosary from off his neck and replaced it on her own neck. The blessing was finished. Her blessing was finished. His eyes would see the way ahead and his hands would guide us safely along the road.

The sun’s glare off another bus blocked my view for a moment. The woman disappeared in that flash of sunlight. The bus driver boarded and closed the door. Air brakes snapped and hissed. We rolled back into the great roundabout and turned toward the street. The sun was now coming right through my window. Blinding. The driver announced our departure to Cuautla. But I wasn’t going to Cuautla. I would go only as far as Amecameca—toward the twin volcanoes that are sometimes visible through the lingering haze of Mexico City. He would let me off on that road.

I looked for the woman again, but the sun was in my eyes. The driver brought us to the street—called General Emiliano Zapata—and waited for a break in the traffic. The sunlight poured into the bus station. For a moment I saw her again—the woman who had offered a blessing on our driver, on us all. A column of light shone at her back. Bright yellow rays shot from behind her.

Our driver pulled into traffic. I blinked again, looking for her. But she was gone. We arrived at the outskirts of Mexico City—where the sunlight was no longer hindered by buildings and walls. The driver lowered the visor to block the morning sun falling on his own face. I closed my eyes against the light and felt the warmth bathing my face. The light passed through my eyelids. Red and yellow.

I placed the heels of my palms over my eyes, pressing hard, blocking every bit of light. I saw her again—a perseveration appearing on my retina—red and yellow and blue flowers embroidered on her white blouse, yellow rays emanating from her heart.

Only many years later I saw her again—in the art studio—between a flash of sunlight and the dark blue sky. She extended her arms again—that familiar gesture of generosity and compassion. I recognized her this time. I didn’t resist her. She had waited for me, patiently, until I was ready.

Paul Burnham is a civil engineer, writer and river-runner in Montana. He has also been a missionary in Brazil, and speaks Portuguese and Spanish.

I’m sure you’ve all seen the horrific pictures of Notre Dame Cathedral being consumed by a massive fire. During the fire itself, while the roof of the building was an inferno, a rescue effort began.

What was saved first? Was it the priceless art, the statues, the moneybox, the gold candlesticks? It was none of these. The first and greatest treasure of that Cathedral is the same treasure that our parish contains – The Blessed Sacrament. A priest, at great risk to his own life, went into a blazing, super-heated 800 year old building as melting lead was literally pouring from the ceiling and he retrieved the Blessed Sacrament. Why? Because Jesus is everything.

The fire at Notre Dame revealed, for me, a connection with that place that came out of nowhere as I found myself surprisingly emotional. I’ve never been there, but as I saw those pictures it was as if my own home was burning down. We all know that a building doesn’t matter as much as even a single human life, but as a watched one of the greatest symbols of Christendom going up in flames, I thought about the 200 years of loving care and labor that those French Christians put into creating their cathedral. That’s how long it took to build. The Church wasn’t a monument to themselves, to their wealth and creativity – the vast majority of craftsman and artists who made it are entirely anonymous – they built it for God. If God is glorious beyond compare, than his home also ought to inspire thoughts of awe, to lift up the heart to God simply by being within it.

In a world of ugliness, Notre Dame was beautiful, and harmonious, and technically challenging, a masterwork of love and devotion. Its destruction was the destruction of beauty and love. That is what is so sad.

It’s interesting, the work of the medieval builders survived much better than anyone would have imagined, and the main structure survived in conditions a modern building would have collapsed under, so the Cathedral will be repaired. It’s almost as if the medievals were very wise and cultured and, to the extent that we have lost the ability to create churches like that, we actually might be barbarians living in the remains of a superior civilization. This becomes noticeable also when we compare the quality of our artwork, literature, and music to what was produced in the 13^th century.

What was their secret? What raised up this great culture that we call Christendom? They were a people who understood that Jesus is at the heart of life, that he is the impulse, the principle by which we are freed from our lesser desires, freed from our addiction to pleasure, our mediocrity, the inevitable fading away into death. The resurrection of Christ is the sign that God would have us live life to the fullest. Christianity is not a religion that dislikes life. We are not attempting to escape this world and into a fairy tale heaven. On the contrary, Christianity gives us our lives back.

More than any cathedral, it is a miracle that the human soul can be redeemed and built up as a holy temple to the sacredness of life. Our faith is earthy and physical. Our Lord, in overcoming death, takes on a human body. Notre Dame was shaped by human hands who turned stone, metal, and glass into a beautiful house for God. You and I, we are shaped by God’s hand from the mud of the earth infused with his breath. You are God’s greatest work of art, a pure, fitting home for Christ. Death will not conquer you, the fire will not burn.

Rejoice, rejoice and be glad. Our Lord has overcome the grave and he is the innermost treasure of our heart.

…Until you return to the ground from which you were taken: For you are dirt, and to dirt you shall return. – Genesis 3:19

Notre Dame Cathedral was built of earth—of stone and wood, of glass made from sand, of metals that were mined. For better or worse, she will be rebuilt. Perhaps she will stand eight or nine more centuries before fire, flood, or neglect claims her again. But in the end, she will meet the fate of her makers. Her sooty towers stand today as a testament to tenacity, to the skill and labor of her builders and the skill and labor of the Paris fire brigade. Today, she stands as an earthly symbol of Holy Mother Church against whom the fires of Hell have not prevailed. But her scorched skeleton also stands as a memento mori to us all. You, O Man, are dust, and all your works but ashes. Notre Dame is dirt, and to dirt she shall return.

By the mercy of God, no human lives were lost in the blaze that consumed Notre Dame on Monday, though all of us who saw it, even via satellite, knew that we were witnessing a death. Much has been saved, but whatever the future holds for Notre Dame, she has lost the illusion of immortality. Anything that has stood nearly nine hundred years, through ages of careless neglect, through the French Revolution and the Nazi occupation of France, was bound to seem immortal. Notre Dame is greater than kings, greater than wars or dictators. She stood above them, reflecting the beauty of the One whom she was built to glorify. Victor Hugo called the cathedral “a sort of human Creation, mighty and fertile as the Divine Creation, from which it seems to have borrowed the twofold character of variety and eternity.”* Today we are forced to remember all too poignantly that her divinity is borrowed. All things that are borrowed must one day be surrendered.

We humans often speak of our work that lives beyond us, of art as a kind of immortality. Paintings and cathedrals can burn, but other works can be duplicated ad infinitum. The original manuscript of Beowulf could be destroyed, but the text would still remain; likewise the score for the Vivaldi Gloria or the Bach Mass in B Minor. We take the perpetuity of such works for granted. They will only die when they have been utterly forgotten. But, unimaginable as it is, that day will come. Anyone who seeks to live forever through his art is chasing after phantoms, trying to hold a ray of sunlight in his hand.

The original architects of Notre Dame sought no such earthly glory—or if they did, they sought it in vain. No one knows their names. We know nothing of their motives, their inspirations, the artistic sacrifices they made to satisfy the constraints of pragmatism or the whims of Bishop de Sully, their client. We know nothing of their faith. Were they ardent believers or closet atheists? Did they work for love or money? In the end, it doesn’t matter. It was not they who labored, but God who labored through them to lead millions of souls to Christ. This is the only glory a Christian can ever find through his creations: To do the will of the One who sent him. Our talents are all borrowed; they must all be returned.

A true memento mori must not only remind us of our earthly death, but of the heavenly life that is to come. Notre Dame is made of this earth but not for it—like you and me. The most miraculous images to emerge from Monday’s disaster are not those of the rose windows still intact (praise be to God!), but those of the faithful praying around the flames. The church blazes, but the Church is not consumed. This—the Body of Christ, the people of God—is the Church against whom the fires of Hell shall never prevail. This is the communion of saints into which we pray to enter, a communion not made of priceless statues but of men and women who comfort and console each other by the grace of God. And this, the flesh-and-blood Church ablaze with Christ’s love, is the Church that I pray will be rebuilt and renewed in the years to come, as we watch the spire of Notre Dame climb toward the heavens once again.

 

* I used this same quote several months ago in a very different essay. It seems a lot of sad themes lead me back to Notre Dame. Notre Dame des Douleurs, priez pour nous.

Many doctors of the Church write that the Virgin Mary died, not of a failing body, but of an excess of love. “Retaining in her memory,” writes St. Francis de Sales, “all the lovable mysteries of the life and death of her Son, and receiving always the most ardent inspirations which her Son, the Sun of Justice, poured out on men in the noon-day ardor of His charity… she was at length consumed by the sacred fire of this charity, as a holocaust of sweetness.”

While yesterday’s fire was still building and seemingly engulfing Notre-Dame de Paris, it was easy to believe that the worst was coming to pass: that the structure as a whole would go the way of the collapsing spire, and that all of the glorious artwork and architecture that has remained as the greatest jewel in France’s tarnished crown would be reduced to rubble and ash. Even worse was the worry that the Sacrament would be consumed and many irreplaceable relics of the Passion lost forever, and this only four days before the annual memorial of Good Friday. With the recent desecration and burning of so many Catholic churches in France, it was easy to speculate about the fire’s cause; with the recent moral state of the Church, it was impossible not to see it as a symbol of things in play and of things to come.

The worst, however, was not to be. Thanks to the life-threatening efforts of many, the Crown of Thorns was saved along with relics of the Cross and of St. Louis IX of France. Confirmation also came that much of the artwork which would have been most easily threatened had recently been removed for restoration. The wooden roof burned and collapsed into the building, but many of the ancient stained glass windows have survived. There were a few injuries, but no deaths.

No doubt we will hear more about the heroism of the police, firefighters, and other first responders in the coming days. Special attention is already going to Fr. Fournier, the Chaplain of the Paris Firefighters who rushed inside to save the Eucharist and the Crown. The full story of what happened and why will take time to unfold.

Already we see lovers of culture and history stepping forward to promise funds for restoration, prompting hope but also worry. The fact that the cathedral still stands prevents the building of something new from scratch. In an age as allergic to all kinds of custom and tradition as ours, one wonders what architectural abomination might have been set in its place. Thanks be to historical preservation societies for saving the Church from herself. Even as things are, the restoration plan is uncertain. One can easily imagine a medieval Rose Window replaced by glass stained with art copied from a book of cheap clip art, as one often sees in today’s churches. The debate about religious art is more important now than ever—does God deserve our best efforts, or will we be content to offer him our worst and call it “humility”?

Daniel Mitsui made some relevant observations in a presentation from two years back,

The treasures of Christian art and architecture are today endangered: by indifference and neglect, by misguided renovation, by war and revolution. They may be preserved for a time for the sake of national identity or lofty but indifferentist notions of cultural worth. But the Lindisfarne Gospels and Chartres Cathedral are things of this world, and will not last forever: Rust and moth consume, thieves break in and steal. More tragic than to lose such treasures is to lose the ability to make them; more tragic yet is to lose the desire to make them. That desire can only be provided by religious faith. It is religious faith that animates the tradition, that makes it live rather than linger.

We live in an age when we have nearly lost the ability to make great art and almost as nearly lost the desire so to do. Can any modern restoration of Our Lady’s church be better than the failed restoration of the Ecce Homo by Cecilia Giménez? Would we do better to merely maintain the structural integrity of the building and move most the art to a museum or private collection? On the other hand, will the Church ever relearn how to build something as vast, complex, cosmological, and simple as the Notre-Dame de Paris without its living example? We are weakened by skepticism and perfidy; do we deserve to look upon its like again?

That all lies in the future. For the moment we wait. The coming days will tell us what can be done and what cannot. The days after that will be filled with argument, bitterness, and perhaps hope. Whatever the future holds for the French cathedral, it will not be identical with her past. We must remember that nothing is too good for the Mother of God. No work or effort is too strenuous for her glory. She is the Burning Bush, the tabernacle of God which was not consumed by the flames of his presence when he resided within her womb.

Beauty is unity radiated through diversity, and few religious works of art have demonstrated this better than Notre-Dame de Paris. May we make ourselves again worthy to built such a temple worthy of God and of his Mother.