Editorial Comment:

Last Monday was not the first time that Notre-dame in Paris had come to terrible harm. On the façade, below the rose window that firemen worked to protect, used to be a larger than life-size row of 28 kings of Judah under stone canopies, sculpted in the 13th century. In 1793, the revolutionary government ordered that “all signs of superstition and feudalism” should be destroyed. In October, from the façade of the cathedral, renamed the Temple of Reason, the statues of the biblical kings were sent crashing down, not by an angry mob, but by a hired contractor. He first struck off their heads, quite cleanly, at the neck.

It had been assumed they were thrown into the Seine. In the 19th century new statues replaced them. Then in 1977, workmen investigating a leak found a trench in a domestic courtyard in the rue de la Chausséed’antin (near the Galeries Lafayette). They found 21 stone heads carefully buried, face down, in soft plaster, all orientated southwards – towards Notredame. They still bore traces of their medieval polychromy.

It was later realised that they had been buried by a devout Parisian, Jeanbaptiste Lakanal, who had bought them in 1796 in an auction from a state grown tired of their lying in a pile of rubble in the street.

The kings’ heads are now on display at the Musée de Cluny in Paris. Visitors are moved by them. Being chipped, with broken noses, they are not conventionally beautiful. But each head’s vulnerable isolation is inexpressibly poignant.

The gallery of kings was erected in the 1230s because from the House of David was descended Jesus. The cathedral of Notre-dame was built as a house of God, of “God with us”, as the Gospel calls Jesus, echoing Isaiah’s prophecy. On preparing those battered heads for burial, Lakanal might well have been reminded of other prophetic words of Isaiah: “He hath no form nor comeliness; and when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him.”

It must have crossed Citizen Lakanal’s mind too that in bravely applying to take these “signs of superstition” off the state’s hands, he was acting like Joseph of Arimathaea, who boldly asked the Roman prefect of Judaea, Pontius Pilate, for the body of Jesus after his brutal execution.

Now a stone head was never alive, so its exhumation can hardly be called a resurrection. Yet the reverent burial of the heads increases the effect they have on those who contemplate them. As for Notre-dame, its more far-reaching injury this week has impelled many who love it, Christians or not, to declare that they want to see its “resurrection” from the flames. That mythical bird the phoenix, said to rise from its own ashes and fly away on the third day, was taken as a figure of Christ who took up his own life on the third day.

It is strange that an inanimate building can seem to embody (more than do ordinary human beings like us) a yearning for continuity, life, eternity. “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up,” Jesus was reported as saying, after chasing the money-changers from the Temple in Jerusalem. The Gospel-writer added: “But he spoke of the temple of his body.”

Christians celebrate Easter tomorrow, in the belief, like the builders of Notre-dame, that it commemorates the Resurrection of Jesus from the dead. Those who do not share that faith can appreciate something it says about the great value human beings place on rebirth, rebuilding, or the remaking of communities broken by war. This can be done only by working in cooperation. As with the heads from Notre-dame, the marks of damage may remain, but that is part of the beauty.