The icons of the West threatened by growing disenchantment

The tragedy of Notre Dame has been interpreted as a symbol of the crisis of traditional institutions, such as liberal democracy, church and integration.

PARIS.- It is true, Our Lady belongs a little more to France and the believers, who will have a long taste of their ashes in the mouth. But the cathedral of Paris is also a world heritage. His fire is a drama that could be interpreted as a symbol of the growing disillusionment of the West against its own values: progress, institutions, democracy, religions, Church, social justice?

The cathedral erected in the heart of Paris, worked by the urban elites of the north of France who prospered thanks to the development of various exchanges and commercial exchanges between the Baltic Sea and the Mediterranean, was not only a monument to God. It also conveyed the image of a luminous Middle Ages, when the technical capacities were put at the service of a monumental architecture. The three large rose windows adorning their facades symbolize this openness and optimism in a growing society, capable of building "stone dreams" throughout Europe, which was then the only West.

Trained in scholasticism, this intellectual culture based on the principles of clarification and hierarchical organization, these elites have left their mark in each of their creations.

"The builders of the clbadical cathedral try to embody the totality of Christian, theological, natural and historical knowledge, putting everything in its place," wrote historian Erwin Panofsky in his book
Gothic architecture and scholastic thought.

Our Lady thus symbolizes one of the greatest achievements that humanity can leave on Earth. Medieval reality, the "white lady" of Paris offered the necessary counterpoint to the obscurantist image of a barbaric and violent Middle Ages, used since the eighteenth century as an argument to justify modernity. A progress that, changing little by little like Notre Dame for nearly nine centuries, gave us the world we know.

Last Monday, for all who believe in signs, the image of Our Lady in Flames suddenly appeared as the unexpected but obvious manifestation of a collapse.

"This word, which is fashionable, threatens us and projects us into an unimaginable future, prevailed at the time to describe what happened to one of the most iconic buildings in our history. " He struck our memory and opened a temporary crack in which the future clashes with the past ", badyzes the philosopher Alain Finkelkraut.

Powerless in front of the television screen, Westerners have witnessed a prophecy that they neither wanted to see nor believe: the flames that devoured Our Lady were the allegory of our world that burns.

It is the collapse, with a capital D, of the biodiversity and the great extinction of the species, before the inaction of impotent governments and the indifference of all-powerful rulers, who seem to adhere to the selfish motto of King of France Louis XV: "After me, the flood".

It is the threat to Western liberal democracies, with millions of men and women no longer believing in institutions, social integration or free trade, the cornerstone of peaceful coexistence. That they let themselves be seduced by the chimera of populism and political extremes as a miraculous solution to a more and more complex and unfair world, which does not give the right answers.

Should we evoke here contemporary commercial wars or false promises promised by Brexit, Frexit or Grexit that lead to disintegration instead of union?

It is the warning that reaches a wobbly church, victim of its moral deviations and internal struggles.

A Catholic has escaped It is a book that should be read urgently by all those who thought to see in the Monday catastrophe in Paris a symbol of what is happening today in the Church: the end of a cycle or illustration of the dechristianization of the West.

Its author, an unfiltered French Catholic named Jean-Pierre Denis, dares to raise the questions that irritate: "Who still thinks that the Lord is all-powerful, creator of heaven and earth, of the visible and invisible universe Jesus died and rose for our sins, who feels the need to be saved?

"For the first time," Denis continues, "the Western man does not consider himself hurt, and for the first time, a church weakened by his badual deviations does not dare to heal him."

"When the arrow of Our Lady fell into the void, it is as if, together, history, faith and beauty had been abandoned in the face of barbarity," writes another French writer and journalist, Bernard Pivot, in terror. by this hallucinatory image of Monday. .

"Our Lady in flames is not the fire of a Catholic shrine, it is much more than that, it is the sudden and unexpected emergence of a past that we believed infallible and that irrupted at the same time as it annihilates, "reflects the French historian Fanny Madeline.

But is it possible to see in the tragedy of the Parisian cathedral anything but the horrible spectacle of a world that collapses?

Stupor

Many things happened on that tragic Monday of the French capital in the souls of men, who alternately pbaded from stupor to incredulity and pain.

However, there was one that could be saved as a symbol of hope and optimism: the universal communion of billions of believing or atheistic men and women, white or black, poor or rich, who may have felt this "dream of stone "as a symbol of their belonging to the same humanity.

For the French-Chinese writer, philosopher and scholar François Cheng, if we could save this miraculous fact, "we would undoubtedly preserve the values ​​of a civilization that seems to be dying little by little, vanquished by the ice of disaffection, annoyance and disdain. "