Cathedrals and organs were made for each other. Literally.
That’s why my wife, Nicole, and I are sitting serenely inside one of humanity’s most beloved buildings—Notre-Dame in Paris—listening to an organ virtuoso ply his trade across the 8,000 pipes of the cathedral’s Grand Organ. I don’t specifically recognize the music, but let’s just say “Bach” and call it good. The fugues and arpeggios and rills and throbs of this massive instrument tumble through Notre-Dame like zephyrs and tides of the universe itself, and one need no selfies nor podcasts nor even any great depth of understanding to be moved.
The organ’s sound waves accomplish that.
At least they did, during our marvelous one-hour visit here in 2018. The moment is pressed as firmly in my memory as anything from that whole year, so it’s no surprise that when Notre-Dame was nearly destroyed in a conflagration less than a year later, the entire world was spiritually stricken. Few human constructions had as firm a hold on our emotions.
So Notre-Dame’s Dec. 8 reopening is this whole year’s finest cause for celebration. Against all odds, France has rebuilt its most important building in all its glory in less than five years, relying on the largesse of countless donors (including two French billionaires) and the work of hundreds of artisans using traditional tools—replacement oak beams were hewn by craftsmen using hand-forged axes, for example. The organ is being reassembled and tuned one pipe at a time, as cathedral organs are designed specifically for the spatial qualities of the building they are in; justly so, as cathedrals themselves are the most acoustically dynamic structures of all. The total cost to reconstruct Notre-Dame approaches a billion dollars, and the restoration has included cleaning and spiffing that makes the interior glisten more than it has for centuries.
If you’ve never been, I say go, for sure. It’s the most meaningful attraction in the whole City of Light.
But let’s take this occasion to celebrate the worldwide value of mankind’s amazing houses of worship, and I say that on behalf of all people, religious or not. One need no doctrine to honor and enjoy great churches; I treasure them for their scale and magnificence and intrinsic meaning. From Istanbul to Rome to London to New York to Mexico City and beyond, they are the buildings that best reflect “the better angels of our nature,” to borrow Lincoln’s thought.
“I never weary of great churches. It is my favorite kind of mountain scenery. Mankind was never so happily inspired as when it made a cathedral,” judged Robert Louis Stevenson, a great adventurer who had seen a multitude of mountains and churches, including Notre-Dame.
Stevenson died in 1894, after a globe-spanning life that gave him the chance to see almost all today’s “great churches,” because most are centuries old and the only new one of any note is Barcelona’s astounding Sagrada Familia.
Skyscrapers and sports stadiums are the modern analogues for the world’s great cathedrals, but they seem artless and mercenary by comparison. I suppose there are a few exceptions: New York’s Empire State and Chrysler Buildings stand out. But juxtapose those with London’s Wembley Stadium and Gherkin and ... I adore London, but yikes. And should you head to Dubai, please just close your eyes.
- St Paul’s Cathedral looms majestically over the City of London like an ivory pinnacle and is a superb backdrop to any image along the Thames, obviating clichéd Big Ben snapshots. The serene Anglican character is suitably prosaic; precious metal frippery and convoluted carvery are minimal.
- St Peter’s Basilica is vast and grandiose and intentionally so; tour guides pridefully point out marks on the floor indicating how other cathedrals (including St Paul’s and Notre-Dame) fall short of its 693-foot interior. It is the world’s largest church (technically a basilica, since it is not a bishopric), and its fine filigree décor does more than hint at the Vatican’s wealth.
- St Patrick’s Cathedral, the United States’ best-known cathedral, has a supremely ironic site on Fifth Avenue opposite what used to be the world’s greatest temple of capitalist wealth, Rockefeller Center.
- Mexico City Metropolitan Cathedral dates back almost to conquistador times and was deliberately sited atop what used to be an Aztec temple complex. While you assess that fact, ponder the idea that St. Peter’s includes huge amounts of stone wrested away from the Roman Colosseum. And Seville’s famous cathedral—the world’s largest Gothic church—deliberately replaced a great mosque.
- Sagrada Familia, the new kid on the block, is 19th-century visionary architect Antoni Gaudí’s recapitulation of Gothic excess blended with Art Nouveau. Its spires and pillars are raucously striated and scalloped and both interior and exterior so extravagantly figured that one’s eyes struggle to rest. Almost complete after 142 years, it is one of a kind, and sure to remain so.
- Hagia Sophia is my favorite of all, outstripping the others in age by an entire millennium. One enters its main hall and is instantly frozen in wonder at the awesome vision and skill of the Byzantine engineers who fashioned this colossal temple atop a hill in what’s now Istanbul. There’s little in the way of fancy decoration beneath the 180-foot dome to detract from the sheer grandeur of the 1,487-year-old space. A bulwark visible from all four corners of the city, its subtle rounded domes convey effortless majesty.
Perhaps it can be seen, if you look hard enough, from all four corners of the world. Hagia Sophia’s ecclesiastical fate illustrates well how such buildings can brilliantly endure the vicissitudes of human interference. Built by Justinian as the Eastern church’s main cathedral in A.D. 537, it was turned into a mosque by Constantinople’s Islamic conquerors in 1453 and remained so until Kemal Ataturk, modern Turkey’s founder, made it a museum open to all people in 1934. But then Recep Erdogan, Turkey’s reigning autocrat, turned it back into a mosque in 2020, currying Muslim votes.
Through all this, the building has stood strong—surviving earthquakes, wars, and political and doctrinal storms. Given the current state of our world, I have every reason to believe it would easily outlast the species that built it.
Do all these buildings represent towering human ambition? Without a doubt. Only Hagia Sophia was completed during the lifetime of its original creator, the rest mirroring countless generations of human yearning. Likewise, not a single cathedral holds within its walls any doctrinal certainty on which we, the living, can hang our grasp of the universe—consider the four-faceted fate of the Hagia Sophia, which has stood strong atop 1,500 years of human meddling with its meaning. The deliberate erasure of previous temples of one sort or another in Rome and Mexico City is telling; cathedrals are bellicose statements as well as architectural marvels.
But that just makes them all the more memorable. Here, these builders have sent us a message from centuries—or millennia—past! We need not personally endorse the message to find it a compelling statement of human nature. Or hubris; or both.
The foundational rumble of the organ at Notre-Dame hints at the enduring existential power held by cathedrals of all shapes, sizes, and locations. Close your eyes at such a moment and you are taken elsewhere in this universe, happily so, until your two human feet drag you back to Earth, ears ringing with the echoes of eternity.
