Tim Stanley - Whatever Happened to Tradition?: History, Belonging and the Future of the West

Contents

FIGURE 1 Notre Dame burns on 15 April 2019.

When I was a lecturer, at the beginning of every term Id tell my students, You may very well be right and dont assume Im never wrong. In the course of writing this book, Ive delved into areas I previously knew nothing about, read authors Id never heard of, and strayed into debates where I probably dont belong and my goal isnt to lay down the law but spark a discussion, to encourage others to challenge and correct me, and bring their own interpretations to the subject. I eagerly await refutation.

In the meantime, I must thank my publisher, Robin Baird-Smith, who has been kind and blunt in exactly the right proportions. Ive never worked with better. The following, through conversations or emails, helped inspire and direct me (sometimes without realising it): Simon and Diana Heffer, Thomas Holland, Giles Fraser, Benedict Kiely, Douglas Murray, Alban Nunn, Rupert Russell, James Siemens and Ed Tomlinson. I am indebted to Nick Waghorn, who guided me through Burke and De Maistre, and to Daniel Joyce and David Oldroyd-Bolt who read the text from cover to cover. Blame them for any errors.

Thanks to the wonderful staff at Bloomsbury, including Jamie Birkett and Julia Mitchell, and to all my Telegraph editors who granted me time off to work on the project. Thanks to Mum, especially for looking after my puppy. And a big thanks to Chris Morris, without whose friendship and counsel nothing would be possible.

This book is an exploration of the philosophy and history of tradition, its uses and abuses, its beauty and necessity. Tradition is not just a pretty thing, much less dead or to be curated it is the past brought to life, guiding us through the present, offering a roadmap to the future. Here in the West weve been at war with our traditions for decades, if not centuries, in the mistaken belief that emancipating ourselves from our history would set us free. We have obsessively deconstructed our past, customs, rituals and beliefs, all at a terrible cost. They say you only miss something when its gone. Thats even truer when its taken rather than given away. In 2019, a mysterious calamity, most likely an accident, engulfed a powerful symbol of European religious and artistic tradition, causing many of us to stop and reflect upon the values and direction of our troubled society.

Around 6.30 p.m. on 15 April, a fire broke out in the attic of Notre Dame Cathedral, Paris. It ran along the roof and up the 300-foot spire; within an hour, this magnificent church, over eight hundred years old, was an inferno. President Emmanuel Macron, speaking on behalf of the French people, said, Notre Dame is our history, our literature, our collective imagination Her story is our story, and she is burning.

Other responses captured the twenty-first century in all its fin-de-sicle loopiness. There were far-right conspiracy theories (did the Muslims do it?), accusations of racism (the widespread coverage and expressions of pain, wrote one columnist, are an example of white supremacy) and the inevitable dash to rebuild its damaged parts in

Modern culture encourages us to examine our ancestors with scepticism, even contempt: They were superstitious, ignorant and dead by forty. But when we look backwards, we occasionally find that some things used to be done better. A lot better. So much so that when the achievements of the past are injured or destroyed, it hurts. No work of architecture finished in the last hundred years is more beautiful than Notre Dame, nor as delicate yet robustly designed (the reason why the fire didnt bring the entire structure down is that its medieval architects built it to resist exactly this scenario). And as Notre Dame burned, Parisians did something few of us would do for an airport terminal or a Trump hotel: they got on their knees and they prayed. Journalists weaving their way through citizens reciting the rosary appeared confused, unable to find the words to describe an outpouring of faith that, like the cathedral itself, belonged to another age. A headline by the Associated Press read: Tourist mecca Notre Dame also revered as a place of worship.

A cathedral is much more than a building. Its a sacred space where the divine blesses the ordinary. All human life happens here: babies are baptized, lovers marry, the grieving say goodbye. Given the thousands of bodies that pass through them every day, cathedrals could be as noisy as a railway station yet visitors fall silent. We do it out of respect for others, of course, but we also feel an instinctive respect for the space itself, for its extraordinary claims to victory over sin and death, expressed in its architecture and relics. Notre Dame housed what is claimed to be the crown of thorns, placed on the head of Jesus before his crucifixion, and the tunic of King Louis IX, a saint. Put those objects in a museum and they bring the past closer to us. Put them in a temple and they bring the past alive. Then is now; now is then; standing before the altar of God, we find ourselves in communion with the infinite.

Notre Dame represents a unity of faith and art, purpose and design, making it the very pinnacle of the Christian tradition and that, I believe, is why Parisians were so deeply upset when the spire crashed through its ceiling. Consciously or subconsciously, they looked around themselves and admitted that nothing this wonderful is being constructed today for the simple reason that so few of us now believe in the things that its architects used wood and stone to articulate. If Notre Dame was the product of a certain way of life, and if that life is gone, can we ever build another Notre Dame? Once tradition is destroyed, can tradition be restored?

I

The answer is yes. Its been done before.

Traditions do not pop out of the oven fully formed and stay the same forever: they adapt and evolve. Work began on Notre Dame in 1163. The original plan was for a heavy roof that required heavy stone walls to support it, which limited the size of the windows. But in the two hundred years it took to complete the structure, architecture changed dramatically. The Gothic innovation of using rib vaults in the ceiling reduced the pressure laid on the walls, allowing for more windows, and the invention of flying buttresses transferred the weight of the ceiling to the exterior of the building, leaving the interior free of supports. This opened up the space and allowed it to breathe. In the eighteenth century, tastes changed again, arguably for the worst: the rood screen was torn down and most of the stained glass was replaced by clear windows.

Then came the French Revolution. The dreamers of 1789 saw Notre Dame as a symbol of royal and clerical excess: they smashed the heads off statues and pillaged the lead roof to make bullets. Even the bronze bells were melted down for cannons. But human nature abhors a vacuum, and having cleared out one religion, the revolutionaries felt they needed another to take its place so Notre Dame was transformed into a temple of reason. Historian Simon Schama describes the pantomime:

In the interior a gimcrack GrecoRoman structure had been erected beneath the Gothic vaulting. A mountain made of painted linen and papier-mch was built at the end of the nave where Liberty (played by a singer from the Opra), dressed in white, wearing the Phrygian bonnet and holding a pike, bowed to the flame of Reason and seated herself on a bank of flowers and plants.