A Reminder of Transcendence

After five years of restoration work, Notre Dame reopened in Paris just over a week ago, in a service presided over by the Archbishop of Paris and featuring remarks from President Macron. For all members of high society, it was the place to be, that weekend: leaders and dignitaries from all over the world were there, from Trump and Jill Biden to Giorgia Meloni and Prince William.

And yet, on such a spectacular occasion, surrounded by breathtaking beauty and haunting, other-worldly rites and prayers, this procession of genuinely impressive figures in the wide world seemed almost small, compared to the event of which they were taking part. “Our Cathedral speaks of transcendence,” President Macron said in his remarks, “We are bearing the legacy of something bigger than us.” His comments were well-put. Even for those without faith, there’s a sense within a space like that that one’s in the presence of that which goes beyond us, that which humbles even as it ennobles us. One sees it even in the way people carry themselves: everyone speaks in hushed tones, sits a little taller, folds their hands neatly in their laps. It’s different from how one would imagine a grand reopening of, say, Madison Square Gardens, where there’d be music and chatter and an overall impression that this is our space, to do with as we please; we own the place, after all. So what’s the difference?

A space like Notre Dame cues us to the reality that we don’t, in fact, own the place. We’re passing, even as we hear whispers of something that is not. There’s a malaise at work in modernity that makes such experiences of transcendence and humility noteworthy for their rarity, but it’s worth marking that for almost all civilizations before ours, a society’s largest buildings were places of worship, and the most impressive artistic or architectural feats were reserved for those spaces’ adornment. Such societies understood that worship connects what is human to what is divine, and as a result had lingering in their minds a sense of the greatness of the soul, despite the smallness of the human – the human who nevertheless could come into the presence of that which mediates something very great for us. By contrast, most modern societies’ biggest buildings are sports arenas and skyscrapers. And these places are cool, sure. But they’re not momentous. And that’s not because they’re just not impressive enough.

Rather, this is one of the trials of a secular culture. Despite all of our high-octane, highly-praised improvements in the stuff of life, we’re suffering from a malaise of meaninglessness and purposelessness. We’re not quite sure what life is all about, what the human person is meant for. Every society that has ever existed before ours was much less comfortable, much less free, and allowed for much less certainty even that its citizens were going to live into the next year. And yet they don’t often get characterized by this same sense of, “Why even bother about it all, anyway?” It would be hard not to associate that difference with a steadier experience of what we caught a glimpse of in the opening of Notre Dame: that we are indeed part of something bigger than us, to return to President Macron’s words; that we’ve been invited into what is infinite and absolute. For the generations of people who kept that invitation ever before their minds, life could be hard, but it wasn’t meaningless. It was momentous. And as Paris’s Cathedral’s reopened splendor invited us to remember just a few days ago, it still is.