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Some things are worse than a devastating fire. Notre-Dame de Paris proves the point.
While its façade, walls, and roof have been restored to a pristine perfection, its interior liturgical appointments tell another story.
- The altar has become a bathtub;
- the pulpit, a highway barrier;
- the sedilia a Star Wars prop;
- and the reliquary for the Crown of Thorns, detritus from a wasteyard landfill.
But the vestments. The vestments were the pièce de résistance. They were worn by the Archbishop of Paris and his attendants. Any man of taste (to say nothing of commonsense Catholics) cringed. They seem to be borrowed from a troupe of clowns at some local circus.
Orthodox. Faithful. Free.
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As Duncan Stroik recently reported in Sacred Architecture:
On July 11th, France’s National Heritage and Architecture Commission unanimously rejected president Emmanuel Macron’s proposal to replace nineteenth-century stained glass windows designed by Eugene Viollet-le-Duc with contemporary designs. The proposal and subsequent design competition sparked controversy and a petition of over 140,000 signatures against the removal of the historic windows and six of the side chapels. The Commission ruled that Macron’s proposal, which Archbishop Laurent Ulrich supported, would be a violation of the Venice Charter, a set of international guidelines for the conservation and restoration of historic sites and buildings. Since the windows were undamaged by the fire, their removal from the historic cathedral was deemed unjustifiable. Despite the commission’s ruling, the proposal could still be implemented.
All this, quite deliberate. You are witness to the grand struggle between the Revisionist Faith and the Ancient Faith. In this makeover, Notre-Dame becomes ground zero in the mortal struggle between the World and Christ.
The Modernist crusade has been nothing less than the successful burial of God beneath the debris of Modernity.
Overwrought, you complain?
Ponder the recent words of Bishop Franz-Josef Overbeck of Essen (Germany): “We must not evangelize the whole world. God will find a way to guide non-believers. Many do not need religion, faith or, of course, any church.”
This, dear Catholic readers, is a burial.
Of course, many, at every level of the Church, pooh-pooh remarks such as this as quaint and untroubling, treating it like the use of the improper silverware at a dinner party. They prefer to take a more positive approach. Such head-in-the sand cowardice has greased the skids of the present calamity.
While the preferred battlefield for the Modernists has been the rarified walls of seminaries, universities, graduate schools, and learned societies, they appreciate that their most potent weapons lie in the vocabulary of symbol, art, and architecture. These are the lexicon of the human heart. They are the privileged places where man’s life is anchored and changed. Manipulate them and you change the world.
Such is simple to prove. For instance, read St. Thomas’ doctrinal masterpiece on the Holy Eucharist. Your mind is instructed and convinced. Then, listen to Mozart’s “Ave Verum Corpus” or the familiar (once standard) Catholic hymn “Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence.” Your heart swoons and your feet want to gallop to Heaven.
This ironclad law of human nature applies to darker things. Study the paragraphs of Mein Kampf, and you touch the roots of hate. Then, look at a swastika, and you break into a cold sweat. Hence, the commanding vocabulary of symbol and art. It is in this field of combat where hearts and minds are won.
The theological grandees understood this well. After their tomes were carefully written, they well grasped that what would win hearts and minds was their iconoclasm. Sacrosanct rules that guided the architecture of churches for millennia were overturned with a rage verging on the fanatical. Sacred vestments, always resembling the canvasses of Rubens and van Eyck, were systematically gathered and destroyed. Sanctuaries that once evoked pages of the Book of the Apocalypse were leveled. Sacred vessels, always meticulously crafted with gold and jewels bespeaking awe of the sacred wealth which they contained, were cast aside with a malign devotion bordering on the maniacal.
All the while, Catholics were reassured that this liturgical carnage was the wish of the Church’s new conciliar spirit of “simplicity.” It was not. In typical fashion, this was the Modernist’s favored term to palliate the unwashed masses. With brutal consistency, the effects of lex orandi, lex credendi set in. Doctrines such as the Real Presence, the Mass as sacrifice, the reality of sin, the cult of the saints and angels, and the very notion of piety and devotion were blurred, if not swept away like flotsam in a tidal wave.
Beauty in the Sacred Liturgy is as critical to its integrity as flesh to a man’s body. Actually, more important. In the language of St. Thomas, it is the resplendent grandeur of form (i.e, that which makes a thing be what it is). Beauty is the irresistible attraction of truth. The Ancient Greeks understood that it possessed the power to shape or misshape the souls of its people. Churchill was probably echoing this insight when he once wrote, “after man makes his buildings, his buildings make him.” Beauty in the Sacred Liturgy is as critical to its integrity as flesh to a man’s body.Tweet This
St. John Damascene came to the rescue of beauty in the 8th century when the Iconoclastic controversy threatened the Church. The heretics believed that beautiful art distorted the truth of the spiritual. They conducted a campaign to destroy it all and would have done so if not for the intervention of the Second Council of Nicaea in 787, whose principal inspiration was St. John Damascene.
Basing his arguments for sacred art upon the Incarnation, he argued that Christ deigned to assume ordinary visible flesh so men would see the Word made Flesh. If God Himself set forth this example, no man should dare prohibit the visible renderings of heavenly persons. With lyric persuasion, Damascene wrote:
The whole earth is a living icon of the face of God. ...I do not worship matter. I worship the Creator of matter who became matter for my sake, who willed to take His abode in matter, who worked out my salvation through matter. Never will I cease honoring the matter which wrought my salvation! I honor it, but not as God. Because of this I salute all remaining matter with reverence, because God has filled it with his grace and power. Through it my salvation has come to me.
Damascene’s arguments are germane to the discussion of the role of beauty in the Church. Before the Second Person became flesh in the womb of the Immaculate Virgin, He was the Verbum in the bosom of the Trinity. His other name was Σοφία (Sophia- Wisdom), through Him all things were made (Nicene Creed). There is order in the cosmos because of the work of Holy Wisdom. So it is that order is of the very essence of beauty (hence, St. Thomas and the three features of beauty: integrity, proportion, and radiance).
Thus, we learn from the Angelic Doctor, as well as the Greeks and the entire tradition of Western art, that beauty is not subjective but stunningly objective, mirroring the order and beauty of nature, which radiates the Beauty of Christ, who is Beauty itself.
Modernity has utterly discarded the classical understanding of beauty, debasing art to a mere voyage into the shallows of subjectivism. Modernism has followed the lead of Modernity with slavish obedience. The purpose of modern art is to create a metaphysical disequilibrium. No points of reference, no fixed notes of observation, no objective index of evaluation. Its slogan is well known to all who inhabit the disorienting universe of Modernity: beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
No, it is not. Beauty is in what the eye beholds. Therein lies a world of difference. As with reality, man bows humbly before it. For the Modernist, reality bows obsequiously before man.
Listen carefully and you can hear echoes of non serviam. Yes, that primordial First Re-Designer of Reality routed by St. Michael.
Pope Benedict once remarked,
If the church is to continue to transform and humanize the world, how can she dispense with beauty in her liturgies, that beauty which is so closely linked with love and with the radiance of the resurrection. Without this the world will become the first circle of hell.
More famously, he wrote, “the only real effective apology for Christianity comes down to two arguments, namely the Saints the church has produced and the art which has grown in her womb.”
The new Notre-Dame de Paris would shock the saints and holy doctors who prayed within its hallowed columns and vaulted ceiling. But today its walls moan as they are compelled to embrace the hellscape of liturgical innovation.
It might not be the first circle of Hell. But it comes pretty close.
Truth, beauty, and goodness. Absent one, absent all.