OPINION

Fire, as a matter of course

As I write this, the cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris is burning. Begun in 1160, completed a century later, the church survived the Reformation, the French Revolution and the Nazis. Now its roof has collapsed, and much of the interior is damaged.

Perhaps what's most surprising, though, is that it didn't burn sooner. Medieval structures caught fire almost as a matter of course. The majority of Notre Dame's exterior may be stone, but the roof was wood, as were those of most European structures from the era. In Notre Dame's case, each beam was carved from a different tree, a feat so spectacular that the interlocking network of beams was nicknamed "the forest." And wood burns. Medieval churches burned.

The cathedral at Canterbury in England caught fire in 1174 when a nearby house fire jumped structures. In Mainz, Germany, the candles used to illuminate the city's new cathedral accidentally brought the structure to the ground on the very day of its consecration in 1015. The cathedral at Chartres was heavily damaged by fire in 1194, and an inferno allegedly killed about 1,000 people at Vézelay in 1120.

In my research, I examined the destruction of the cathedral at Orléans in northern France. According to 11th-century chronicler Ralph Glaber, signs and portents occurred in the year 988, pointing to something terrible on the horizon. An icon of the crucifixion miraculously wept and a wolf burst into the cathedral, seized the bell-rope, and rang the church bells. These fears came to life when a fire swept through the city and the church burned to the ground the following year. There was little that could be done. The citizens could only watch.

There are too many other examples to name them all.

And here we are back in the present, at Notre Dame, Paris, 2019. But that history may offer a note of hope, if only because in the past, tragic fires often led to later triumphs--both artistic and communal.

The people who built Notre Dame accepted catastrophic fires as a way of life, yet still--as we do--mourned their destruction. One author wrote after the destruction of Canterbury Cathedral that this "house of God hitherto delightful as a paradise of pleasures, was now made a despicable heap of ashes, reduced to a dreary wilderness."

Yet the European Middle Ages sometimes confound us because that mourning rarely gave way to despair. When a cathedral crumbled, it rose again. After the fire at Orléans, the people of the city immediately began rebuilding upon the ashes of the old church, working together to make the city surpass its former glory. They mourned by building together.

The towering cathedrals that dot Europe's landscape are mostly monuments to resilience, testaments to what you could build after fire claimed what had been built before.

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Matthew Gabriele is a professor of medieval studies in the department of religion and culture at Virginia Tech.

Editorial on 04/18/2019

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