1,548 words
Notre Dame de Paris burned this week in a fitting metaphor for our civilization. We all watched as the spire crumbled in real time and the fire ripped through the interior, feeling helpless before the inevitable march of history.
Whether it was by arson or neglect, much of Notre Dame is gone forever. Emmanuel Macron’s government plans to rebuild the great wonder in just five years, and is hosting an “international competition” for redesign plans. “Should we rebuild the spire envisaged and built by Viollet-le-Duc under the same conditions . . . (or) give Notre Dame a new spire adapted to the technologies and the challenges of our times?” asked French Prime Minister Edouard Philippe.
The announcement caused grief for many people who wish to see Notre Dame restored to its original glory – sans modern additions. Ultimately, it’s the French government’s call on the redesign, as they own Notre Dame.
The destructive fire brought up the question of what Notre Dame represents. Nearly everyone on social media had an opinion on the matter. Ben Shapiro claimed it as a monument to Judeo-Christianity – a historical anachronism anathema to the medieval Church. Shapiro later claimed we needed to return to the “philosophy” and “values” that built it, which implied the conservative commentator thought the Enlightenment crafted the Cathedral. This view sees Notre Dame as a representation of “Western values” – specifically, the claptrap that Cold War America claimed to stand for: liberty, free market capitalism, and an ecumenical Judeo-Christianity.
Others admire it as a wonderful piece of art, a beautiful thing they saw on their college trip to Paris. There is no better way to signal that you belong to America’s upper-middle class than to share your story of visiting Notre Dame. It’s just so beautiful and sad that no other tourists can get a selfie there anymore! Such people see Notre Dame as nothing more than a nice spot for tourists. This is the most common view, and is what makes the Cathedral so profitable.
Aggrieved minorities see the Notre Dame fire as cosmic retribution for the injustices of white Christians. According to them, the great Cathedral was built on the ill-begotten fruits of colonialism and showcased art stolen from Third World cultures. It was a monument to bigotry built at a time when the Jews were being expelled from France and Talmuds were burned. It wasn’t inclusive, and represented the bad, old Europe. Good riddance. Such people view Notre Dame as representative of Western civilization – and that’s bad.
Catholic conservatives insist that the Cathedral was theirs and theirs alone. Notre Dame is a place of worship and built by men of God, they say. The only way to truly rebuild it is for France to repent and return to its ancestral faith. To imagine the Cathedral as anything but a monument to God and Our Lady is to debase it. Some Catholics have even suggested that the French should leave Notre Dame a burned-out husk, since the secular redesign is likely to defile the sacred place. A ruined Notre Dame would be a fitting tribute to France’s lost faith and the triumph of liberalism.
The proponents of all of these views will fight over Notre Dame’s reconstruction. The most likely scenario is that the new redesign will largely recreate the old elements, while adding some modernist garbage. The French state will insist that the additions are necessary to reflect the diversity and values of the modern world.
Some scholars and journalists agree. “The building was so overburdened with meaning that its burning feels like an act of liberation,” Harvard architecture historian Patricio del Real told Rolling Stone. The magazine also said that “some people in France” resented Notre Dame as “a monument to a deeply flawed institution and an idealized Christian European France that arguably never existed in the first place.” And Oxford graduate student Daniel Judt wrote in The Nation that the fire presented an “opportunity” to remake Notre Dame into a symbol of a more inclusive France.
It’s probable that these views will influence Notre Dame’s redesign. The new structure will announce that this Cathedral belongs to modern France. One can only hope they don’t recruit the disgusting, anti-white artist who designed the mural beneath the Eiffel Tower for this project. Catholics and others who want the old Notre Dame back will be disappointed by whatever redesign French officials agree upon.
The Catholic view of Notre Dame may be the most historically sound one, but their wishes are the most unrealistic. France is barely Catholic anymore, and shows no sign of reconversion. Only five percent of French Catholics attend mass weekly, and just fifty-three percent of France identifies as Catholic. Priest ordinations continue to drop, with fifty-eight French dioceses in 2018 reporting no new priests. Hundreds of churches have been vandalized in the past few years, with only a collective shrug from the French people. The fire may have saddened French Catholics, but it’s unlikely to make them go to church again. Most people who go to Notre Dame are tourists with little connection to the old faith. It had already been effectively reduced to an interactive museum, redesign or no.
It’s right to lament what we have lost and hope we can regain it. But the spirit of medieval Catholicism is far removed from our own time. Medieval people saw most illnesses and catastrophes as caused by demons. Witches were real in their world, and so was magic. The world was flat and the Earth was the center of the universe. Anti-Semitism was part of the faith; no one talked of “Judeo-Christianity.” The Church had no issue with waging war on Christendom’s enemies. It built immortal structures. The Pope had actual temporal power, and monarchs had to bend the knee to his authority.
Nowadays, most conservative Catholics accept scientific explanations for illnesses and disasters. The world is desacralized. The Catholic Church has apologized for anti-Semitism, and most Catholics pretend that “Judeo-Christianity” built Western civilization. The Church has apologized for the Crusades, and seeks “dialogue” with Muslims. The Church builds abominations all on its own, and the current Pope kisses the feet of Third World warlords and panders to the progressive elites.
Catholicism is not the militant faith it once was. Only LARPers see the burning of Notre Dame as the matchstick that will bring back the old Church. It was undoubtedly a tragedy, and forever ruined one of our civilization’s great works. An identitarian perspective sees Notre Dame as connected not merely to a religion or values, but to our people.
“I chose a highly symbolic place, the Cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris, which I respect and admire: she was built by the genius of my ancestors on the site of cults still more ancient, recalling our immemorial origins,” wrote Dominique Venner in his suicide note. Venner famously killed himself in Notre Dame Cathedral in 2013. The French patriot, although a non-believer, saw it as an expression of the European soul and a fitting place to defy its decline. “Lacking an identitarian religion to moor us, we share a common memory going back to Homer, a repository of all the values on which our future rebirth will be founded once we break with the metaphysics of the unlimited, the baleful source of all modern excesses,” he wrote.
Oswald Spengler saw Gothic cathedrals like Notre Dame as an expression of the Faustian soul. They captured the world spirit of the North’s high forests, of “treetops struggling to escape the earth.” Regardless of the faith practiced within its walls, Notre Dame embodied Western man’s essence. This was a monument that could never have been produced by Ethiopian Christians. It could only have been made by us.
This is a factor that is never taken into account by others. Yes, the Cathedral was built by men of God – but they were white men. It could only be made by spiritually healthy Europeans. Deracinated architects of the current year could never recreate it. The values that were expressed by Notre Dame were not those of the Enlightenment, or anything else that is today upheld as “Western values” by “respectable” conservatives. In its essence, it was rather deeply reactionary.
Those non-whites who celebrated Notre Dame’s burning understood something about it that most conservatives didn’t get. It represented white people and their civilization. That’s why they cheered its destruction.
Whenever Western civilization is brought up by its defenders, it means one of three things: it conjures up its “values,” its religions, or its people. The first is the most acceptable and popular meaning. The second is slightly less common, but still socially acceptable. The third, however, is forbidden and despised by those who uphold its other two meanings. But it is this view which is the truest, and it is the view of identitarians. While our values and faiths may change or weaken, the European peoples still remain. We can revive the spirit that created Notre Dame and other great works as long as we still exist.
We see Notre Dame as a tragedy because we know that the people in power can’t be trusted to restore it. If identitarians had power, it would only be a minor setback. No one would doubt that Notre Dame could be restored to its former glory.
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24 comments
“The Catholic Church has apologized for anti-Semitism, and most Catholics pretend that “Judeo-Christianity” built Western civilization.”
I wouldn’t mind seeing an article on debunking some of these arguments. Our politicians love throwing the word ‘Judeo-Christian’ around.
I would argue the opposite. That true Christianity is basically “Juedo-Christian” in nature.
That, Catholicism and Orthodoxy are basically paganized and mystified versions of Christianity, respectively.
And that low-church Protestantism (e.g., Puritanism or Plymouth Bretherenism) is the closest thing to “real Christianity” we’ve seen in the modern or post-modern world.
http://www.unz.com/ishamir/the-blaze-of-hate/?fbclid=IwAR3fcN07IMPlQBSXhQZ16xXP-wfjVjvLFF56EYpVk40MZg6b4HnDc4c8PWs
I disagree, insofar that low-church Protestant Christianity is whatever Luther and other Central and Northern Europeans retconned from their translation of the Bible and discarding mostly everything else early Christians believed in, which was kept in copious letters and writings that Catholics and Orthodox call Tradition. If early Christians were indeed both more Jewish and Hellene, then it stands to reason that they kept these customs more often, instead of the dry low church positions that could only be arrived at with a naturist/secularist lens from a Northern Renaissance perspective that wanted to make Christianity more local for the bourgeoisie to control (an excess borne from the legitimate desire to curb the excesses of the Catholic hierarchy), and therefore abrogated much necessary complex theology by printing the Bible and saying that was all there was (irregardless of the fact that Tradition came first, and the Bible is but a selection of it). Lest we forget, for example, that early German Christians such as Charlemagne didn’t care for iconography as much. So let’s not pretend low-church thought was strictly arrived at by Judaizing, but rather due to a retconning of both Judaizing and pro-Germanic ideas (similar to how many Protestants want to fund the rebuilding of the Jewish Temple – ignoring that the Bible clearly states that Jesus’s death replaced the older sacrifices). Here’s hoping these white Protestants find out their mistake soon, all that northern white niceness bites back… and happy Easter either way.
“I would argue the opposite. That true Christianity is basically “Judeo-Christian” in nature.
That, Catholicism and Orthodoxy are basically paganized and mystified versions of Christianity, respectively.”
There is almost no relationship between modern day Rabbinic Judaism and Christianity. Modern day Judaism evolved out of the teachings of the Pharisees following the destruction of the second temple in AD70. It is an ethnic cult whose raison d’etre is opposing Christianity. Modern day Jews are the descendants of the Pharisees (and their converts), the Jewish sect against whom Jesus spoke out constantly for their hypocrisy, legalism and hard-heartedness. The rest of them had became Christians by this stage and were absorbed into the general population, or were wiped out by the Romans. And the Talmud (burned as hate speech by the French in the middle ages) and all it’s arcane rules and customs is supposedly based on oral traditions that conveniently weren’t written down in the old Hebrew bible. Make of that what you will.
The early church fathers were absolutely woke on the JQ. The beloved St Augustine wrote:
“Judaism, since Christ, is a corruption; indeed, Judas is the image of the Jewish people: their understanding of Scripture is carnal; they bear the guilt for the death of the Savior, for through their fathers they have killed Christ. The Jews held Him; the Jews insulted Him; the Jews bound Him; they crowned Him with thorns; they scourged Him; they hanged Him upon a tree.”
Blessed John Chrysostom wrote:
“Many, I know, respect the Jews and think that their present way of life is a venerable one. This is why I hasten to uproot and tear out this deadly opinion. I said that the synagogue is no better than a theater and I bring forward a prophet as my witness. Surely the Jews are not more deserving of belief than their prophets. “You had a harlot’s brow; you became shameless before all.” Where a harlot has set herself up, that place is a brothel. But the synagogue is not only a brothel and a theater; it also is a den of robbers and a lodging for wild beasts”
Rather than representing the ‘true’ Christianity, low-church Protestantism is an arrogant abomination with their exclusive emphasis on sola scriptura. St Paul only wrote 14 short letters in the Bible, but he literally spent years instructing the early churches in proper practice which was preserved in all the ostensibly pagan/mystical elements. The church fathers wrote voluminous works in the time of the early church interpreting doctrine through the lens of Hellenic philosophy and were much closer in time to the ‘true’ Christianity.
It’s more likely to be the chanting, robed, incense-swinging priests who look pagan or mystical in their beautiful churches who are more in line with real Christianity.
Considering Jews no longer consider a Jewish man Jewish if he converts to Christianity, but still a Jew if he is an atheist shows how full of shit people like Ben Shapiro are. If Ben Shapiro is as Jewish as he says he is (since he never shuts up about it), he knows this.
“…Aggrieved minorities see the Notre Dame fire as cosmic retribution for the injustices of white Christians. According to them, the great Cathedral was built on the ill-begotten fruits of colonialism and showcased art stolen from Third World cultures…”
The Notre Dame was built between 1163-1345, 147 years before Columbus discovered America, a date that could be taken as symbolic for the start of European colonialism in the world. Therefore the cathedral could never have been built with wealth “stolen” from the Third World. Third World rancour never cares about historic accuracy when it comes to creating its myths.
Thank you for this!
Daniel (((Judt))).
If our buildings, our highways, our railroads should be wrecked we could rebuild them. If our cities should be destroyed out of the very ruins we could erect newer and greater ones. Even if our armed might should be crushed, we could rear sons who could redeem our power. But if the blood of our White race should become corrupted and mingled with the blood of Africa, then the present greatness of the United States of America would be destroyed and all hope for the future would be forever gone .” – United States Senator Theodore G. Bilbo, 1947
Same thing can be said for Britain and its Paki/muslim/hindus. For France and its african/muslims. For Germany for its turks/muslims.
Thank you for your loving eulogy of the death of Notre Dame. It is as I suspected, the government will indeed ‘rebuild’, but add multicultural embellishments to make the new edifice ‘welcoming’ to all. But as you so poignantly pointed out — it was built by white people, our ancestors, with their creativity, their multitude of hard-earned skills, and their heartfelt love in building it, totally by hand, over 200+ years. It belongs to all of US, not just France, and WE will dearly miss it. I, too, as a student of Art History (B.A. 1970), visited in 1971 and gloried in its artistic beauty and workmanship, and I now — as a follower of White Nationalism — can add yet another layer of contemplation to the miracle of its creation so many years ago, by US.
Macron will do his level best to extract all the money he can from the French true believers and other Catholics to “rebuild” the cathedral in order to bring maximum harm to them, and to make them poorer.
“[…] scientific explanations for illnesses.”
Fwiw, science comes out of Catholicism. Also, the distinctions between then and now in terms of the mystical and magical are in my view overstated or over implied in your essay. I once believed this too and went to graduate school because of it. It seems more likely some people are more mystical throughout time. Besides what’s the real difference between a demon and a disease?
Conspiracies and antisemitic libels aside, the question is whether our present European civilisation is capable even of a passable restoration of what has perished in the flames.
The reconstruction of Coventry Catherdral, bombed by the Luftwaffe, was undertaken by British sculptor Joseph Epstein, a proud Jew, as a fusion of modernism and medieval spirituality. If the results are sometimes regarded as coarse, one cannot dispute the sincerity of the sentiment symbolised by his great sculpture of the Archangel Michael victorious over Lucifer.
In our degraded and strenuously ironic era could even that relatively ecumenical gesture could be achieved in the teeth of the scorn and recriminations that emanate from the Left whenever Christianity is broached?
Only some hideous deformation of the original structure, replete with genuflections towards the plight of minorities, if not the very Holocaust, would suffice.
Is it not interesting that in all the West, the only nation that seems capable of erecting places of worship in an authentic and beautiful Christian idiom, with no concessions to the void ugliness of modernity, is the one where up to a generation ago the dissemination of atheism was compulsory.
Perhaps on this Easter Sunday we may hope that the great Orthodox East may one day soon extend its joyous regeneration into the spiritual wasteland vacated by the retreating Latins and, most especially, the self-loathing Anglo-American Protestants?
Allow me to share an anecdote and conclusion. Feel free to dismiss it, as I’m sure many will, for religious reasons or because it is “not useful” to “da movement.” Full disclosure here: I am atheist.
My evangelical coworkers care nothing for the damage to Notre Dame. They say the structure is nothing more than “a building,” worthy of no more consideration than “a warehouse,” and its replacement/repair is an insurance matter. I was partly surprised by this attitude.
Later I cornered three white members of the group and asked them if they felt an ancestral connection to the builders, and if the loving labor, craftsmanship, and selfless devotion of those builders to a certain metaphysics – misplaced or not – wasn’t worthy of preservation and memory. They said, “Not really” and “No.” When I asked them why, scripture was cited.
Theology justified this simplistic reduction to “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.”
These white men call themselves “conservative.” They are given to “conservative principles.” These “principles” are based in protestant theology, in which man’s spirit completely transcends his material existence – or something to that effect. Thus the concept of blood and soil is shunned. The attitude toward Notre Dame demonstrates a disregard for for all that follows/arises from the concept.
Evangelicals are not realists; those who consider themselves to be realists are inconsistent.
Reality is a bother. Now I understand why evangelicals are given to certain utterances when life/bosses/coworkers/wives/children/neighbors are difficult. It isn’t suicide if Jesus raptures these bunnies.
The failure of evangelicals to conserve blood and soil no longer surprises me, not even by a fingernail clipping. May they live long until raptured.
More anecdotal musings, fwiw.
Six centuries ago Catholics may have burned me at the stake for heresy.
Funny that I, the ever heretical atheist who will surely burn in hell, can’t help but feel a greater connection to many Catholics than I do to Protestant rapture bunnies.
[Not that Catholics love me, mind you.]
Funnier still is most (not all) Catholics of my acquaintance don’t think my burning will be for eternity (meaning, “forever”). Furthermore, they speak kindly and engage in Socratic dialog.
Are they, like me, closer to Reality?
[Worthy of further investigation, I think.]
But I guess that’s because Catholics are more evil than evangelical Protestants. Right, rapture bunnies?
Whether God exists or is merely a human projection (I think this is inherently unknowable), American evangelicalism is extremely weird by classic American and especially European Protestant standards (the Puritans were a tough but also mostly bizarre bunch – and I am endeavoring NOT to make that claim anachronistically, ‘reading’ them with 20th century secular eyes). Not quite as weird as Mormonism, but close. Ironically, both groups make good neighbors and “micropolitically” good citizens (I probably vote with the modal evang or Mormon 90% or more), but “macropolitically” their theological bizarrities can lead to many policies which are dangerous over the long haul. Some examples are anything to do with racial reality; their insane Israel worship; and purely ideological opposition to any kind of rational family planning (they share this anti-empiricist outlook with normally theologically sounder Catholics).
Useful comment. Thank you.
Sorry for making a tangential remark, as a side note, I want to call the attention of CC to the following point: I wonder why there hasn’t appeared a post on CC in commemoration of the 130-year anniversary of Adolf Hitler, usually in a familiar format of “Remembering Adolf Hitler, April 20, 1889 — April 20, 2019”? Isn’t the number 130 as an integer a significant node of time for commemorating such a great albeit flawed political, ideological and historical giant who had immensely impacted on the world-historical course of 20th century, more than anyone else, and like it or not, is factually and inevitably linked to the cause of White Nationalism?
Hitler admittedly belongs to the camp of Old Right as aptly put by Dr. Johnson, and his legacies have both positives and negatives, both lofty inspirations to admire and emulate and deep and acute lessons to learn and overcome. But isn’t it true that Mr. Johnson himself has objectively and correctly pointed out that for all the flaws and limitations of Hitler, had he triumphed, White race and White civilization would still be in a much better and healthier state than they are now.
Besides, CC did run commemorative posts on Hitler in the past years.
In short, failing to see a similar, if not a grander entry this year on the 130-year anniversary of Adolf Hitler is really a disappointing and mind-boggling thing for me and even makes me doubt the moral courage and fortitude of this great website which I have read, loved and supported throughout these years. I hope CC would heed the humble voice of readers and fans like me, stand fast and adhere to a principled, mature, consistent, and indomitable stance regarding Hitler and other similarly demonized and controversial figures/issues in this age of Kali Yuga.
Please at least give Hitler a commemoration piece that he, as a world-historic figure central to the history of a heroic struggle of the White people against an alien hostile global enemy, amply deserves.
I stopped doing those commemorations because they excited the wrong kind of people. I used to think I could make something out of that audience. I have given up on that. Mature National Socialists will understand.
Point taken. Thanks, Dr. Johnson, for your explanation. Even tough I didn’t remember to have noticed any particularly disruptive or counter-effective comments myself in the past CC commemoration posts on Adolf Hitler apart from some well-founded and intense debates on the pros and cons of his wartime policies, perhaps you had seen some unfortunate and deleterious side effects that I didn’t see, on this platform or somewhere else on the cyberspace or in real life, generated by commemoration pieces on Hitler.
Therefore, although feeling disappointed, I respect your decision regarding this topic as I trust that you have a more comprehensive and macro-view and have the best interest of the White race and his civilization in mind. Maybe it’s indeed not the best timing to highly commemorate Hitler and his legacy now, but I also believe that when we gain our final victory, Hitler as a world-historic giant and great leader, warts and all, will receive his due recognition and proper commemoration across the White societies and in the entire world.
I burned a candle for him, but I am afraid that Doctor Johnson is right, we cannot make anything of use out of those people as far as the movement goes, nor can we make anything of use out of the Ku-Klux-Klan, or the the American Civil War, or for Christians for that matter.
Men built it, men who knew they would not see it finished in their lifetime when the cathedral began to be built. Who among any civilization would do such a thing today, plan a building that would take hundreds of years to complete? To my point of view, it did not belong solely to France, it belonged to the world as a wonder and I see it’s passing every bit as distressing as the destruction of religious sites by the Taliban and Isis from antiquity. It makes me very sad indeed to think that modern man will just have to put his diverse spin on it. I’d like to see it restored to it’s original self or not at all. When I was younger, I always dreamed of going to France to see the sites that I read about in books such as The Countess Angelique. I definitely do not wish to go any longer as there’s nothing there that remains from the past that I would care to see. The Eiffel Tower behind fences and with modern murals, no thank you. Palace of Versailles, maybe. The Louve, no, not really, not since the glass pyramid was added on anyway. The passing of Notre Dame is the passing of what I knew to be France. For me, France is no longer France.
I rarely put a link in a comment, but I think people should read this short post:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/bethany-surrenders-religious-liberty-christian-dalits/
Yes, the precise issue is remote to C-C concerns and The American Cuckservative’s editor is not a true friend of the White race. But the article is implicitly about what WE are facing as well. And if traditional Christians might need a Benedict Option, so, too, do and will racially traditionalist Whites. We, too, need to build “communities of resilience” (and “resistance”), wherein we pass on traditional Western values, ethnocultures, and White consciousness and pride, as we become minorities in all our ancient homelands, including not so ancient but still our America.
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