Susan Cahill - Hidden Gardens of Paris: A Guide to the Parks, Squares, and Woodlands of the City of Light

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From the author ofHidden Gardens of ParisandThe Streets of Pariscomes a beautifully illustrated guide to the history of Paris through its renowned and beloved places of worship.

Read on for an excerpt.

On Sale April 19, 2022

Learn more or order a copy.

God is in everything, Vincent van Gogh (18531890) shouted up and down the hills of Montmartre. He wasnt just a solo manic-pantheist en plein air. Some of his fellow artists and those who came earlier and later felt the same way: Hector Berlioz, Zadoc Kahn, Henri Bergson, Olivier Messiaen, Antoine de Saint-Exupry, Robert Bresson, to name only a few. Mystics, rabbis, philosophers, musicians, painters, filmmakers. Anonymous millions.

The great French painter Eugne Delacroix (17981863), whose work van Gogh adoredespecially his colorswrote in his Journal: God is within us. He is the inner presence that causes us to admire the beautiful. When he listened to his friend Chopin play the piano, he said he heard Gods presence descending through his fingers. For Delacroix, beauty connected us to the divine.

That intuition of a hidden living presence in the most beautiful city in the world is the focus of this book: Sacred Paris: A Guide to the Churches, Synagogues, and the Grand Mosque in the City of Light. People give that hidden presence different names: God, the Sacred, the transcendent, the divine. Or it goes unnamed. For some its conscience. Consciousness. Love.

Sacred Paris guides travelers, whether on foot or reading at home, to look for the traces of mystery in the traditional settings for prayer and worship: the churches, synagogues, and the Grand Mosque, which are also the settings for enchanting concerts of sacred music. This is a world often overlooked by Parisians themselves and by travelers.

There are also the untraditionalor noninstitutionalsettings of the sacred, for example, the river Seine as seen from Place Aragon in early morning light. As the Seine and the centuries flowed on, both were seen almost universally from a sacred perspective. So, too, the Montmartre hills where prehistoric Celtic druids built their altars. Or the cafs all over Paris where terraces come alive in the smiles of friends as well as in the joy of lovers, strolling the quays under the night sky.

When the Enlightenment and the Revolution drew a line between what they called the sacred worldif they acknowledged its existenceand the secular world, many people, especially artists, did not connect with that bifurcated design: that was not how they saw reality. To visionaries who desired the whole pictureor just the flow of its parts in various directionsthere was no line, no wall separating the universe according to abstract definitions or preconceptions. Reality was not a matter of boxy historical eras and rectangles and squares with fixed boundaries between them. Reality was unboundaried. Fluid. Incomplete. The modernist James Joyce evoked the once dominant father god as a shout in the street.

Jocoserious Joyce was not blaspheming. On Sunday mornings he walked the Seine bridges with his friend Samuel Beckett, now and then stopping in churches, checking out masses or baptisms, still familiar from his long-ago Catholic childhood. Loving the streets and quays of Paris as he had loved the Liffey and the bridges of Dublin, he would have agreed with van GoghGod is in everythingor, as he put it in Finnegans Wake, Here Comes Everybody.

Paris is a city on a river, the sacred river Seine, whose source according to some historians and mythmakers is of divine origin, the offspring of the healing goddess Sequana. The abiding, always moving arc of the river makes all the difference to how Parisians see things. Is it possible that all of life is like a river? writes the poet Henri Cole. We must either yield to it or struggle against the current.

American philosopher William James, a regular visitor to Paris from early childhood and author of The Varieties of Religious Experience, also noted the fluidity of things, of time itself: This shifting of the emotional center towards loving and harmonious affections, towards yes, yes and away from no, said James, is, the love of life that is the religious impulse.

When van Gogh was asked what his theology was, he said, Love many things.

The word sacred has taken on new meanings in the decades before and after World War II. What is still sacred after the death of God? asks Richard Kearney, editor of Re-imagining the Sacred. What can we call holy after Auschwitz, after the disappearance of the God of triumph and certainty?

The German martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer, awaiting his execution in a Nazi prison, called for a future of holinessreligionas simply a new life in existence for others. He interpreted transcendence, the sacred, as the neighbor who is within reach in any given situation.

The Polish poet Czeaw Miosz saw religion, like poetry, as a contradiction to nihilism.

The French philosopher, political activist, and rsistante Simone Weil, walking her native city where she was raised in a secular Jewish family (though she liked visiting churches), wrote that if Christianity is not incarnatemade flesh in the service of human beingsit is not Christianity: rigid rules have nothing to do with the sacred.

Visiting the citys various sites of worship or meditation, you will be walking (map in hand) the main geographic quartiers of Paris: le de la Cit; le Saint-Louis; the Left Bank and its quartiers (Latin Quarter, Saint-Germain); Southern Paris (Montparnasse); Western Paris; the Right Bank and its quartiers (Montmartre; the Marais); Northern Paris; Northeastern Paris; and the Bastille.

You will find each of these districts or quartiers in the Contents. Travelers and readers found this organization easy to follow in my books Hidden Gardens of Paris: A Guide to the Parks, Squares, and Woodlands of the City of Lightas well as inThe Streets of Paris: Following in the Footsteps of Famous Parisians Throughout History.