Phillip Kennicott has a fascinating piece in the Washington Post about the current debate going on in France concerning the rebuilding of the Notre Dame Cathedral that was destroyed by a fire in April of 2019. He takes the reader through the cathedral’s history, from its creation in 1163 through the various modifications that were made up until the fire damage of last year. The specific, physical details of the cathedral’s rebuilding are unimportant, but its philosophical significance is incredibly important and cannot be understated. 

Last year, CRIT-LARGE published a piece, by yours truly, on the burning of Notre Dame, “The Collapse of Western Civilization.” The cathedral’s burning, while a sad event in of itself, symbolized a much deeper and slower destruction of the civilization it represented. In a sense, Notre Dame represents Western Civilization, and similarly, not much has been done to begin to restore the West to its original founding principles of liberty, equality, tolerance, and faith. Instead, Western Civilization continues to bicker amongst itself, doubt itself, and lose its confidence in the very progress in which it helped create. 

One of the point men on the rebuilding of Notre Dame, Phillipe Barbat, raised this question about restoring the cathedral: “Do we restore it as close as possible to what we understand by analyzing the historical context of the building, or do we try to make something more creative?” This question highlights the current crises facing Western Civilization: should the West fight for itself, its values, and the good it has brought into the world or should the West roll over and accept what today’s culture says about it: that Western Civilization has been a vehicle for oppression, hatred, racism, and the like? 

Kennicott makes this statement in his piece: “The writer Hilaire Belloc once described Notre Dame as a matriarch whose authority is familiar, tacit and silent. But she now seems not just reticent, but mute.” The very same thing can be said about the West. Some of the world’s greatest blessings: individual liberty, capitalism, respect for the rule of law, etc. were all realized because the West made it possible and because it’s authority was recognized. But today, in the middle of attacks on the civilization that it created, by the very same people that have experienced the blessings brought upon by the West, the West seems mute. As the British economic historian, Niall Ferguson, remarked in his book Civilization: The West and the Rest, “Today…the biggest threat to Western Civilization is posed not from other civilizations, but by our own pusillanimity - and by the historical ignorance that feeds it.” 

Towards the end of the Washington Post article, Francis Rambert, the director of architectural design at the City of Architecture and Heritage in Paris, is quoted as saying, “We know we can construct it exactly as it was…But the question is, do we need to sacrifice all those trees?”

If the sacrificing of trees means taking on the efforts necessary to rebuilding the West, then the answer to Mr. Rambert’s question is: yes. Do whatever it takes to rebuild Western Civilization to the confident, realistic, idealist, and religious civilization that it once was. You must do it. We must do it. There is no other way. The fate of the West, and thus the world, rests on its restoration.