April 16, 2019: Soul of France, Organizing Principle, All Roads Lead To Paris

The novelist Henry Adams, grandson and great-grandson to presidents of the United States, lamented at the dawn of the last century that “All the steam in the world could not, like the Virgin, build Chartres”. (1) Adams was comparing the paucity of modern enterprise with the inspiration of medieval culture. Indeed, it took three hundred years to build the cathedral at Chartres an effort that s not only spanned nearly 30 decades but required the communal sacrifices of, perhaps, 15 generations. What could inspire the sacrifice and instill the discipline necessary to build such an edifice?  Only the Blessed Virgin provided inspiration sufficient to bend the collective minds and hands to such communal purpose.  It was the idea that was the dynamo, because the idea gave purpose and meaning.  

In drawing the distinction between the then modern locomotives and medieval cathedrals Adams noted that “the power embodied in a railway train could never be embodied in art.” (2) Adams was lamenting the dominance of the masculine over the feminine in the emerging industrial order and in so doing giving increasing prominence of the hand and head over the heart and the soul. Noting “that neither the ancient goddess Diana of the Ephesians nor any of the Oriental goddesses was worshiped for her beauty. She was goddess because of her force, she was the animated dynamo; she was the reproduction—the greatest and most mysterious of all energies”.(3)

In medieval Europe the Virgin was the organizing principle. She embodied art because she was the animating dynamo, the origin—if you will-- of not only personal salvation but national identity as well. And it was this that animated communities throughout Christendom to erect, as with the ancients with Aphrodite and Athena, monuments to her honor. But cathedral of Notre Dame became, much more than that for, representing the greatest and most mysterious of all energies, it became the very soul of France. It has  taken its place along with the Parthenon as a monument to western civilization.

The cathedral has stood for over eight centuries during which time it has witnessed and comforted those who have suffered from many plagues. It has stood as the nation was torn through many a civil strife from wars of succession, to riots and unrest. It survived, remarkably, the French Revolution as did Chartres and other cathedrals; although Robespierre and his revolutionaries would abandoned the Christian calendar and sack the monasteries, they could not bring themselves to destroy the Cathedrals. While the Guillotine rolled through the streets of Paris, the revolutionaries could not wage war on soul of France. It was here that Napoleon crowned himself emperor and here that the monarchy was restored. The monument withstood the Franco-Prussian war and the ensuing Paris Commune as well as the World Wars of the twentieth century.

Yesterday, it burned. It will be rebuilt because it must be rebuilt; because all roads no longer lead to Rome or Athens, but to Paris. The Dynamo cannot replace the Virgin as surely as the computer and the robot cannot replace humankind. The Dynamo is the Virgin, the organizing principle, the very reason. 

_________

1. Adams, Henry. “The Dynamo and the Virgin” extracts from “The Education of Henry Adams” Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1918, pp 379-390. See Baritz, Loren. “Sources of the American Mind A Collection Of Documents and Texts in American Intellectual History” 1966: New York: John Wiley and Sons. Pp 180-189. See page 187.
2. ibid. 187
3. Ibid. 184.