Paris' Notre Dame Cathedral: The beauty of faith recounted in stone

By Delphine Allaire

"A true act of thanksgiving and an act of faith; do not settle for admiring the magnificent stones. Remember that this is a gift from God and a gift for God."

Archbishop Laurent Ulrich, the Archbishop of Paris, made that invitation regarding the restoration and partial reconstruction of Paris's iconic cathedral just weeks before its reopening.

Ahead of the reopening ceremony on Sunday, December 8, Roger Pouivet, a French philosopher of religion and professor emeritus of the University of Lorraine, spoke to Vatican News about the link between culture and heritage.

Q: Is it a recurring challenge in the process of heritage restoration to maintain the spiritual essence of a place within a sophisticated dialectic between faith and architecture?

A work of art like Notre Dame is characterized by what it signifies. The intelligibility of faith—what one can understand of the Christian faith—is at stake during a visit to the cathedral.

For Notre Dame to remain the same, visitors must be confronted with the same meaning and spirituality. A materially well-executed restoration allows for this but is not sufficient. There must be a clear idea of what one will see and an appropriate and adapted discourse on what is seen and what it is.

Notre Dame must function as the object it is—a place intended to help us understand something of faith through its very form, the statues, paintings, and stained glass it contains. Beyond material restoration, this is a genuine ontological challenge.

Q: How can the right degree of patrimonialization, both necessary and desirable, be achieved without diluting the spiritual meaning of the place?

It is very difficult because everything must be addressed simultaneously. In part, the restoration of Notre Dame involves a major site of international Parisian tourism, a kind of national heritage with which France and the French identify.

But all of this is somewhat external to what Notre Dame is, or rather, it is something that overlays and could obstruct Notre Dame from being what it truly is—a cathedral of faith.

Restoration must accommodate the need for a national monument without transforming the cathedral into a replica or a monument for international tourism. This is the risk of restoration, but it has been largely avoided in this case. It was not a given, and we can hope that once the major ceremonies are over, we will once again have Notre Dame as something other than a monument, an element of heritage, or a tourist attraction.

Q: Does the emotion and spirit of communion witnessed over the past five years testify to the unity and gathering symbolized by the cathedral?

Certainly, the interest surrounding Notre Dame and the genuine international emotion felt by those who saw it burn testify to something significant. It is entirely natural to celebrate the completion of this restoration and its success in terms of art history and craftsmanship.

However, there is always a risk of transforming, through its restoration, a cathedral into a monument. It is therefore essential to emphasize the distinctly religious dimension—the soul of the building. Notre Dame is different from the Louvre or the Château de Versailles.

Q: How does this foreshadow a spiritual restoration? Many see an undeniable sign of faith in the fire, restoration, and reopening. How can this be the case, and how can it be perpetuated from a spiritual perspective?

It is important to emphasize what Notre Dame signifies and what makes it function aesthetically. It is not simply a successful architectural work but has a religious significance that its visitors must understand.

This must also entail, in a certain way, the restoration of faith and Christian life. It is an architecture that can only bring us meaning and continue to be what it is on a distinctly religious, even theological, condition.

Q: What would be Notre Dame's theological condition?

Theologically speaking, the cathedral holds considerable importance. A German art historian from the early 20th century, Erwin Panofsky, an eminent iconologist, authored a book titled Gothic Architecture and Scholastic Thought.

He discussed Notre Dame and demonstrated that the great Gothic cathedrals, particularly Notre Dame, function in the same way as scholastic thought—that is, the way theology developed from the 11th and 12th centuries and for two or three centuries thereafter through the Summa, for instance, Saint Thomas's Summa Theologica. He drew an analogy between the two.

In a certain sense, Notre Dame is a kind of theological summa in architectural form. It is made of stone instead of Latin words. It does not address visitors in the same way as those who read the Summa Theologica, but it fulfills the same function of making faith intelligible.

This function must return with the restoration. The restoration of Notre Dame will be a significant moment for faith.

Q: How can it be explained that transcendence often emanates from stones?

Spiritual elevation cannot be detached from material life. It takes meaning for us in material things. One could almost draw an analogy, for someone like Saint Thomas, between what we are and the cathedral: we are material beings, but we have something called reason, which is spiritual and not reducible to matter.

The cathedral is a physical and material entity, and restoring it requires cutting new stones—it is a material affair—but something more must be brought out: this distinctly human spirituality. Human beings are bodies, but they are bodies with a soul—a rational soul, a spiritual soul.

The cathedral functions exactly like a human being, at once a material entity that dies and a being that is not entirely reducible to its matter. In a certain sense, one might say that Notre Dame also has an immortal soul that must be brought to light through its material restoration.

Q: What about evangelization through beauty? Can the cathedral's beauty also touch hearts closed to faith?

One can hope that the aesthetic appreciation of Notre Dame will or could become the source of an elevation toward spiritual beauty and not merely material beauty.

This is the most challenging part. It involves avoiding Notre Dame’s reduction to what other architectural landmarks, like the pyramids or the Parthenon, have become—international tourist sites stripped of their essence. All that remains is a testament to something people once believed, which occasioned the construction of aesthetically and architecturally impressive monuments.

There is a risk that Notre Dame will simply become, after its restoration—and it already was to some extent—a site of international tourism.

How can this be different? By restoring its spiritual dimension, ensuring it still means something to those who enter it beyond a mere vacation visit between the Louvre and Versailles.

Notre Dame is a high place of faith. This does not depend on this weekend’s inaugural ceremonies. It will not be decided at this moment but rather in how this restored cathedral continues to fulfill a genuine religious function or increasingly becomes a monument or tourist attraction.

For this reason, December 8 is not as decisive as the years to come. To know if the restoration is successful, we must wait 50 years to see what becomes of Notre Dame after its material restoration.