Five and a half years after the fire that nearly destroyed it, Notre Dame Cathedral has reopened. The roof and spire have been rebuilt, replacement windows installed, and the organ has been restored. It has three new bells. The official reopening is December 7, 2024.
Emmanuel Macron has praised the rebuilders for their alchemy in taking on the “insane challenge” of turning charred coals into art. The rhetoric is that the Gothic masterpiece has been saved. But has it? ?
Impressive as this cleaner version may be, is it the same cathedral as the one that was damaged? Philosophers have long been vexed by questions of identity over time.
Some things don’t change much, like the Rosetta Stone, which dates from 196 BCE and is currently housed in the British Museum. Other things change substantially, yet we talk about them being the same. Human beings are an obvious case.
The Ship of Theseus is a famous philosophical puzzle on this theme mentioned by Plutarch (and by me previously in this column, too). The ship in which Theseus returned to Crete after slaying the Minotaur gradually rotted and all its planks were replaced one by one. Philosophers were divided as to whether the repaired version was the same ship in which Theseus had sailed or a different one.
In the 17th century, John Locke used the more prosaic example of a sock that was darned and re-darned until none of the original wool was there. Was it the same sock after all those repairs?
The repaired Ship of Theseus (not unlike the repaired Cutty Sark in Greenwich) is a direct descendant of the original ship at least, and likely to show us something of what the original vessel was like. So, if you want to know about the ship’s appearance, it’s very useful; but if you want to touch the very boards Theseus touched or turn the very wheel that the Cutty Sark’s skipper turned, you probably can’t. That feels like a loss.
Ships, unlike cathedrals, don’t have to remain in a single place. Probably some cathedrals have been dismantled and moved to a new location, but that doesn’t happen often (I wonder if we’d be prepared to say we were really visiting Salisbury Cathedral if it had been transferred stone by stone to Milton Keynes).
Nor do they typically remain the same over time. Cathedrals get new chapels, are repaired and modified. They evolve.
This combination of site-specificity and modification over time makes cathedrals very different from objects like the Rosetta Stone. We expect any cathedral to change, just as we expect an oak tree to grow yet in some sense remain the same tree.
Notre Dame is very different from Lascaux II. This replica cave, which opened in 1983, is a facsimile of the famous Lascaux with its Paleolithic paintings.
Lascaux II is a very accurate copy of the two main halls of the original cave. It was built next to it after the real Lascaux was shut to the public for its own preservation.
What Lascaux II lacks that the new Notre Dame retains is the continuity in precise place, even though by all accounts the replica cave is superb and recreates something very like the experience of entering the original cave. No matter how accurate Lascaux II is, though, no one thinks that the accuracy makes it just as much a Paleolithic site as the original.
It lacks its authenticity, the aura of its history. The walls of the cave aren’t the very ones that the early artists painted, even though only an expert would be able to tell that simply by looking at them.
You might be tempted to say “Does all this talk about identity really matter? Only philosophers worry about this kind of thing. You can describe Notre Dame as either the same building or a substantially altered one and nothing much hangs on that either way.” I disagree.
In this case it highlights what we think Notre Dame essentially is. If you think it’s a museum piece, an architectural gem that despite repairs and additions over the centuries has retained many original features and materials, then today Notre Dame is not what it was – too much has been lost.
But if you think of it as something more organic, an evolving functional building, a centre of religious practice with great symbolic value, then it is the same Notre Dame, continuous with previous instantiations – more like a friend who has had a facelift and suddenly looks rejuvenated.
