Our Lady in front of her demons

The recent fire at the Notre-Dame de Paris cathedral suggests some reflections that go beyond, even urgently, the only lament for the fortunately partial loss of a great monument of the past.

The first thing to do is perhaps to consider the importance of what burned and what resisted. It was recalled that much of what had been lost, especially the imposing cruising needle, were modern and not medieval creations. The architect and pioneer of the restoration, Viollet-le-Duc, proceeded to a vast restoration, which one could describe as new design, in the second half of the nineteenth century to give a more perfect aspect according to their ideas.

The question of whether these interventions were less valuable or worthwhile deserved a nuanced answer. Admittedly, they were an integral part of the monument, they had not only helped to shape his modern image (when there was already a photograph), but also to build the image of the perfect Gothic cathedral. They are therefore an integral part of what we understand by Our Lady.

However, they are still doubtful from the point of view of the history of architecture, and one could say that they had not been recognized as such by the builders of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. When it comes to intervening in reconstruction, decisions must be made that affect these interventions.

Surely, talking about the original in this building does not make much sense. Well, we must not only remember the intervention of Viollet-le-Duc, but also the various restorations carried out during the twentieth century, as well as the long history of building construction.

In the same place, a Roman temple was installed. It was later transformed into a Christian temple, also reformed several times. Around 1160, the current temple was started and after about a hundred years of construction, even the Gothic style with which it begins is modified.

Several subsequent actions have transformed their plant even further, so that responding to what is or was the "original" building is actually meaningless. There has never been, beyond the construction in the historical imagination, a perfect and complete Notre-Dame which has now been lost.

On the other hand, not the physical building itself, but the meaning of Our Lady has evolved over time, result of social, political and ideological constructions of each historical moment crossed and by which, inevitably, It was appropriate. For example, nothing more distant, although close in time, than the feeling that the revolutionaries of 1789 granted to the cathedral the symbol of (almost) all that they wanted to destroy to build a new future on their ashes , that the coronation of Napoleon Me as the Emperor of France in 1804, which restores its symbolic power.

This constant resignification is checked now, after the fire. In the media, the rapid reaction of leaders of various European countries who deplore not only the artistic loss, but the breaking of a symbol for the French and even for all of Europe has been reported. A symbol that turns out to be the Christian ideal of an era, the idealized values ​​of a medieval community or the collective effort that led to its extensive construction, and which seems to have to be baderted to claim the current project of European construction .

And who is Notre Dame, if that is someone? The critic and British moralist John Ruskin, contemporary of Viollet-le-Duc, has already suggested that the monuments are not so much "our" good, be at each historical moment which are these "us", but in part those which they have built them and, in particular, those who will inherit them.

Heritage is not what you get, but what you receive and, therefore, is not entirely it. In this sense, we must resist the temptation to confer upon Our Lady a simple object in her possession and to consider preserving it, precisely for future generations, in its complex wealth. In other words, the urgency of the restoration would not be an obligation for the present, regardless of the emblematic tourist emblem that we can miss in the Parisian sky, but for l & # 39; future.

One last thought. I would like to recall the fragility of things, which we seem to have lost the ability to recognize. If the information is confirmed, the fire was only an accident. The way this has been possible, despite all the security conveyed by seemingly infallible experts, must be more than a mere reminder of the necessary and constant care that human works, and human life itself, require.

So reconstitute yourself, Our Lady, but do not forget that the condition of every building, every human work in general, and even of one's own life, is not the embalmed preservation of one's life. origin nonexistent, but the constant opening to what, unknown, happens. And that includes, yes, his disappearance.

José Vela Castillo: Professor of Theory, History and Architecture Projects, IE University