A church-burning in Paris

Not just any ordinary old church, either. Not by a long yard.

Five Easters ago - the start of Holy Week 2019 - fire broke out at Notre Dame cathedral. Within a couple of hours, the spire and the roof were gone. Whatever the cause of the conflagration, the symbolism of its loss at that particular point in the Christian calendar was sobering.

This is what I wrote the following day:

Twenty-four hours after Notre Dame de Paris began to burn, there is better news than we might have expected: More of the cathedral than appeared likely to has, in fact, survived intact - including the famous rose windows, among the most beautiful human creations I've ever seen. The "new" Notre Dame will be mostly high up and out of sight, which is just as well given that modern man prides himself on having no smidgeonette of empathy with his flawed forebears and thus the chances of historic recreation of the animating spirit of 1160 are near zero.

There is an architectural debate to be had, I suppose, about whether a reconstructed twelfth-century cathedral requires nineteeth-century appurtenances such as its spire. But the minute that starts you risk some insecure dweeb like Macron, on whose watch the thing went up in smoke, getting fanciful ideas about bequeathing to posterity some I M Pei pyramid on the top of the roof. France's revolution, unlike America's, was aggressively secular, and it ultimately found expression in the 1905 law on the separation of churches and the state. Since then the French state has owned the cathedral, and thus it will be Macron who ultimately decides what arises in its place.

Beyond that are the larger questions: When the iconic house of worship at the heart of French Christianity decides to mark Holy Week by going up in flames, it's too obviously symbolic of something...but of what exactly? Two thousand churches have been vandalized in the last two years: Valérie Boyer, who represents Bouches-du-Rhône in the National Assembly, said earlier this month that "every day at least two churches are profaned"—by which she means arson, smashed statutes of Jesus and Mary, and protestors who leave human fecal matter in the shape of a cross. This is a fact of life in modern France.

As it is, there is no shortage of excitable young Mohammedans gleefully celebrating on social media. In 2017 some inept hammer-wielding nutter yelling "Allahu Akbar!" had a crack at Notre Dame, and a couple of years before that the historian Dominique Venner blew his brains out on the altar to protest same-sex marriage. I love France but, in recent years, it's hard not to pick up on the sense that it's coming apart - and that, when the center cannot hold, the things at that center, the obsolete embodiments of a once cohesive society, are a natural target.

In addition, the authorities' eagerness to assure us that it was an accident at a time when such a conclusion could not possibly be known—and when their own response to the emergency was, to put it politely, somewhat dilatory—was itself enough to invite suspicion: "Sure, it might be an accident. But, even if it weren't, they'd still tell us it was…"

So, precisely because Paris is full of people who would love to burn down Notre Dame four days before Good Friday, it seems bizarrely improbable that it should happen by accident: that a highly desirable target should be taken out by some slapdash workman leaving a cigarette butt near his combustible foam take-out box—the lunchpack of Notre Dame—and letting the dried-out twelfth-century timbers do the rest.

Yet that surely is as perfectly symbolic as anything of a desiccated Christendom and its careless stewardship of its glorious inheritance. On Tucker's show last night I wondered aloud about the Parisians weeping in the street: What were they mourning? The loss of great architecture? Beautiful artwork? Magnificent music in an acoustically perfect space? Or were they mourning something greater, the loss of some part of themselves? When I interviewed Douglas Murray about his profound book The Strange Death of Europe, one subject that prompted a lot of comment was Douglas's plea, as a non-believer himself,  that the citizenry try to reconnect with their lost faith if not in a religious sense than at least in a respectful socio-cultural way: These ancient buildings are part of what we came from, and who we are to this day, etc. Any Anglican knows that for much of the twentieth century the Church of England functioned well enough as a religion for the not terribly religious - chaps with little time for all this God-bothering but who enjoyed the liturgy and the hymns and the comforting feeling that God was in some sense an Englishman…

Douglas's argument is, as it were, a good-faith argument, sincerely made. But, after reading his own reaction to the burning of Notre-Dame, it felt a little tinny and hollow, as if he knows it's not going to be enough to try and fake it. He's not alone in that: I mentioned Michel Houellebecq's protagonist in his novel Soumission who, even as he understands the need to do so, cannot will himself to re-connect with a Catholicism just beyond his reach. A lot of the people who are sad about Notre Dame fall into the same category - like Brits who get upset when it's reported that this or that BBC radio programme is ending after fifty years even though they haven't themselves listened to it since a wet Sunday afternoon in 1987. The point about a prodigal son is that he assumes he can always come home. But sometimes, when everybody's prodigal, there's no home to come back to.

And so, well…here we all are, faking damned near everything, Western Civ’s prodigals having traded in a glorious and noble heritage for a mess of “spiritual” PC pottage—and nary a fatted calf in sight as compensation for it, either.

Happy Easter, everyone.