God, France & the Virgin

NOTRE-DAME OF PARIS (341 pp.) -Allan Temko -Viking ($6.75). I darted a contemptuous look on the stately monuments of superstition.

-Edward Gibbon (speaking of the Gothic cathedrals)

All the steam in the world could not, like the Virgin, build Chartres.

-Henry Adams

A disciple of Adams rather than Gibbon, Medievalist Allan Temko, 31, has put his love and knowledge of the Cathedral of Notre-Dame into an astute and eloquent book that merits shelfroom with Adams' famed Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres. But while Adams sought out only the major thread of medieval unity, Author Temko weaves a tapestry of multiplicity-within-unity. Along with the rising cathedral walls, he traces the rise of the Capetian monarchs to rule Paris, the rise of Paris to rule France, the rise of French Gothic to rule an age. "The Church clothes her stones in gold and leaves her sons naked," chided St. Bernard of Clairvaux. But in their devotion to Mary, the medieval sons of Paris were content so long as they could carry the stones.

$100 Million Gamble. On their island in the Seine (the He de la Cite), Paris Christians first carried stones to the site of Notre-Dame about the 6th century. The church they built was razed by the Normans in the middle of the gth century. A new basilica of Notre-Dame lasted the better part of another three centuries, but by 1140 it was too small, and worshipers fainted away in the crush. A year or so before, a bold, bright farm boy from the provinces was drawn to the intellectual beehive of the schools of Paris, and in the next two decades climbed the ecclesiastical ladder to become Bishop of Paris.

Maurice de Sully was a practical dreamer with a vision almost as striking as that of another French provincial, Joan of Arc. Though his chiefs of staff were two unknown master builders, the grand design of Notre-Dame as it stands today was largely his. He raised the money (the cathedral eventually cost the 1955 equivalent of $100 million); he met the payroll and disciplined the work force (some 1,000 masons, metal smiths, carpenters, etc.); he personally selected leading artists and chose the subjects of the complex iconography. And he took fresh architectural gambles. The ceiling of Notre-Dame rises higher (107 feet) than any other cathedral then built, because Bishop Sully trusted the strength of the relatively untested ribbed vault; Sully's second master builder was one of the first to develop the flying buttress.

Joy on the Catwalks. From the time of the laying of the first stone in 1163 to his death 33 years later, Sully lived to see the cathedral largely completed. As if through the aging prelate's prismatic eye,

Author Temko captures the sense of communal effort and joy:

"The Bishop, old now, looked on as the great vessel rushed westward to completion, bay after bay of the nave . . . vault after vault . . . as son replaced father in the craft of masonry and the art of sculpture, growing more expert, more sure, more ambitious; working from daybreak to sunset . . . and then the next day, at dawn, climbing the scaffolds again, as the morning Mass was sung in the choir, mounting higher and higher in the early sunlight, looking beyond Paris to green fields and forest; higher and higher, as the Virgin steadied them on the catwalks and cornices and smiled down at her civilization and her city."

"One Sees What One Brings."Whether it is pious King Louis IX kissing beggars' feet and waiting on lepers, or 100,000 Frenchmen shouting "Give us Crosses!" to go on the Second Crusade, or the winegrowers of a Paris suburb ducking a statue of their patron saint in the Seine for allowing the frost to harm their vines, Notre-Dame of Paris chronicles a people and an age on fiercely intimate terms with their God. Notre-Dame is their monument. In it "one sees what one brings," as Henry Adams put it.

Gibbon sneered. Victor Hugo shouted exuberantly among the huge bells. Heinrich Heine, looking up, saw himself in a great hollow cross, and wept. In 1793 a Paris mob put nooses around the necks of the statues of the 28 kings on the massive western fagade, toppled them to the pavement below and chopped off their stone heads. Yet in August, 1944, the cathedral bells pealed out the first news of liberation, and 12,000 Parisians squeezed inside to offer up their thanks to God with a Te Deum.

The intellectuals. Author Temko notes, left the Cathedral of Paris for Chartres about the turn of the 20th century, and have not returned since. Notre-Dame is Everyman's church, and every man's reminder of the religious genius of the 12th century, which "built churches of a bewildering beauty and bewitching youth [and] sang in allegro, like a spring or a bird."' And like a spring or a bird, "the Cathedral is never in repose but is perfectly equilibrated. When most calm, it lifts, and lifts again, in a further serenity. Balance equals tens'on. Beauty equals power. The Virgin is at work."

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