When Did We Stop Aspiring to Eternity?

The Notre Dame fire reminds us that we once aspired to build something greater than ourselves

The Angel of the Resurrection on the Roof of Notre-Dame, Paris. Photo: Charles Nègre via The J. Paul Getty Museum

“It is like losing a member of one’s own,” said one disconsolate onlooker at the burning of Notre Dame cathedral. It did feel like that — an intimate shock and wound — but it was also worse, in a way, because it was the death of something larger than a human life, something meant to outlast us, compared to which one person is paltry and transient.

Notre Dame is one of those wonders you learn about in childhood encyclopedias, that you comfortably regard as a permanent fixture of the world, like the Colosseum or the Empire State Building, the Great Coral Reef or Mount Everest. But at sufficiently high temperatures, anything can burn. And the temperature is rising. The ruins of Rome are testament to the fact that great empires and high civilizations can die, and we’ve seen skyscrapers fall. The coral reefs are already dying, and the snows are retreating even from the roof of the world.

The understanding of our own smallness and insignificance, which at first comes as an unwelcome disillusionment, eventually becomes a kind of comfort. We all learn, one way or another, to live with the inevitability of our individual deaths, to believe, through faith or art or our children, that the extinguishment of our personal universe is not the end of the world. In Lewis Thomas’s essay, “Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler’s Ninth Symphony,” he describes the last movement as an exquisite farewell, a cathartic consolation when contemplating his own death, but it becomes “a hideous noise close to killing me” at the thought of nuclear holocaust, of universal extinction. I got some of that same shiver of more-than-mortal horror watching flames roil out of the stained glass windows.

The cathedral is the artifact of a people who had faith in continuity, in a future, of a civilization that still believed in itself.

Cathedrals were built as houses of God, for eternity; even for us atheists they remain monuments to human aspiration, testaments to multigenerational cooperation toward a common goal. Notre Dame was built over the course of…