What the Notre Dame coverage kept missing.

The world was transfixed Monday as an iconic Parisian tourist attraction burned horribly. There was also a church on fire.

I mention the latter because news stories banged on about Notre Dame as a historic landmark before throwing in the place of worship thing as a kind of curious footnote. And I found myself wondering why they thought people went there.

To some extent, in quintessentially modern fashion, it’s famous for being famous so people went and looked

because people went and looked. Also it’s beautiful and historic. But those truisms are uselessly vague. Why is it beautiful and historic and how do they connect? Through the church?

Bauhaus theorists gave us the slogan “form follows function.” And went on to create buildings so hideous in form as to suggest a problem with the materialistic, hedonistic functions they serve. Ads for river cruises offer you nature and old buildings. Yet modernity stuffs us into shiny glass and steel box towers surrounded by cement and is too proud to wonder why we’re unhappy.

So could it be that Gothic cathedrals are beautiful because they are cathedrals not due to a bunch of technical tricks? I don’t deny the genius of flying buttresses, pointed arches and other innovations that enabled stone to soar. But the distinctive architecture of Gothic cathedrals is trying to say something.

Judaism told us man was made in the image of God, and Christianity that God made himself in the image of man, reaching down to us so we could reach up to him. Which is what the great cathedrals do, from Chartres to Salisbury, the latter built with ropes and chisels in just 38 years under Elias of Dereham, who also brought the Magna Carta still displayed there with its opening guarantee of religious freedom. See how it all connects?

There is beauty in other religious architecture too, from the Great Pyramid to Angkor Wat. And in medieval castles, which fused natural materials and the natural landscape in such harmony that even their ruins often inspire awe, exactly unlike a half-wrecked mall or hotel. But great Christian architecture has a distinctive form because it has a distinctive theology, down to playfully grotesque gargoyles reminding those whose minds wander during services not to let them wander too far from God.

One may regard such notions with scorn. Or wistfully, as lovely but no longer credible. But something

IT SPEAKS TO OUR ASPIRATION TO BE BETTER THAN WE ARE AND OUR BELIEF THAT IT IS POSSIBLE.

makes Notre Dame so evocatively beautiful that it must be rebuilt.

Or rather, revealingly, reconstructed. If a church burned down in the Middle Ages, or collapsed, the normal response was to aim still higher. Today we can only aspire to an exact replica … if they waive the fire code.

If no cathedral had ever stood there, it would not occur to anyone to build one now. As postmodern novelist John Barth once said, “If somebody built the Chartres cathedral now, it would be an embarrassing piece of real estate, wouldn’t it? Unless he did it ironically.” In which case no one would go.

Barth also said Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony would be embarrassing today. But Mozart will outlast Lady Gaga. And even most modern churches are lugubrious or hip eyesores people would no more visit in 2819 than they’d rebuild the CN Tower, Place du Portage or the latest pretentious condo development if they finally burned down instead of collapsing centuries earlier.

In praising Notre Dame, people tap-danced around this central point. The New York Times’ David Leonhardt said it “connects humankind across the centuries” and recalled visiting with his dad at 11, “looking up and thinking it was the oldest thing I had ever seen.” A Maclean’s piece made it even more explicitly all about us, from “the first time you saw the carved twin spires from the taxi window” to “The moment you cried when you reached the last page of Victor Hugo’s novel” or “curled up on the couch with your parents, the VCR on, watching the animated gargoyles come to life. It is trite to say Notre Dame belongs to all of us. Nonetheless, it is true … a landmark in our own lives.”

Actually it belongs to the Church … via the state, France being France. And if we stare in awe we should ponder why and how it connects humankind. Why was it maintained for eight centuries? Why did it inspire Hugo and loom over Paris even when desecrated into a farcical “Temple of Reason” during the French Revolution? Why does secular France’s agnostic president pledge to rebuild it?

For the tourist revenue? To avoid being thought vulgar? No. Because it speaks to our aspiration to be better than we are and our belief that it is possible.

So Notre Dame must be rebuilt and will be. And, with any luck, people will then go to see a glorious House of God.