Ode to Notre-Dame (by Jacob T. Levy)
“I’m a nonbeliever, and when I was a believer, my first faith was white-clapboard-chapel New England Calvinism. (Judaism came later.) I know I had been in a Catholic Church a couple of times as a kid, but the first time I attended a Catholic service as a teenager as part of my study in a comparative religion class, I was genuinely horrified at the crucifix, the gaudiness, the (as the word occurred to me right away) idolatry.
I’m very happy to have gotten over that reaction, and to have gotten over it even before my first visit to Notre Dame 24 years ago. Even as a nonbeliever I can feel the religious purpose of grandeur and awe as much as I can of the simplicity and quiet of one of those chapels. I can appreciate the way that the Catholic tradition and the architecture it inspires and inhabits can call to the worshipper . . . . as I can the other religions I know well. My medievalism adds a little bit more appreciation still, especially for the sense of connections over generations and centuries that has been important both to Catholicism and to the construction of medieval cathedrals.
Which is to say that I don’t recognize the coherence of the ‘only belongs to Catholics and if you don’t believe it is the Crown of Thorns then shut up’ vs ‘a beautiful building that is heritage of humanity’ fight that has somehow taken over a lot of social media in the wake of the Notre Dame fire. It’s not just a beautiful building; it’s an awe-inspiring building. The awe that it inspires is a Catholic religious awe. And the purpose of that is not only to nourish the spiritual needs of the committed and faithful. That orientation toward awe in Catholic architecture (and particularly medieval Catholic architecture) had the purpose of drawing in the ignorant, the illiterate, the uninterested, and letting them feel a human-scale fraction of the awe they were supposed to feel before God. It was a moral-psychological education to bring outsiders in, to lift up the eyes and the spirit.
In a religiously pluralistic world, we recognize that as only one of the (to borrow a phrase) modes of religious experience. It’s not uniquely Catholic, but it certainly is Catholic, and in Christianity it’s especially Catholic. (The eastern church had its episodes of iconoclasm; the western did not.) What I as an outsider find in Notre Dame isn’t just the experience of looking at a pretty building. It’s the experience of being a little bit drawn in to a distinctive and particular approach to fundamental things, one that is meant to draw you in and that has successfully done so with a great many people for a very long time.
It’s a very particular moral-aesthetic language for saying things that are meant to be universally understandable. ‘Universal’ doesn’t mean bland or generic or lowest-common-denominator; it means human. Reading beautiful and morally deep literature in its original language—is that a universal experience, or a particular encounter with a particular language, era, culture? Well, both, of course. Why should the encounter with one of the ways that other human beings have thought about and worshipped God be any less ‘both’?”—Jacob T. Levy
