Different Cathedrals, Same Feeling

Left: Cathédrale Notre-Dame; Right: Basílica de la Sagrada Família

Today, I am focusing on two vastly different, soaring visions of devotion to God: Paris’s Cathédrale Notre-Dame and Barcelona’s Basílica de la Sagrada Família.

After its devastating 2019 fire, thousand-year-old Notre Dame, the paragon of French Gothic architecture, reopened late last year. It inspires awe with its pointed arches, ribbed vaults, flying buttresses, and stained glass. I glimpsed at the exterior from a distance last October and have been inside pre-fire Notre Dame several times. 

More than any particulars of the art and architecture within, I remember how this grandiose space made me feel: small and insignificant. 

Notre Dame's interior (pre-reopening)

Cavernous, dark (though not as dark now that it has received a good scrubbing), and somber, Notre Dame transports me back to a time when life’s wonders and mysteries were wholly attributed to divinity. The fact that the cathedral still functions this way in the present age is a testament to its power.

Sagrada Familia

Meanwhile, the Sagrada Família in Barcelona has been under construction since 1882. It is finally due for completion in 2026.

Its character is Modernist and neo-Gothic, and it incorporates Art Nouveau flourishes that its chief architect, Antoni Gaudí, also employed to tremendous effect elsewhere in that great city.

Melting at the Sagrada Familia, 2009

The Sagrada Família inspires awe differently than Notre Dame. I find the whole thing hallucinatory, and it frankly reminds me of an acid trip I took in 1982 when Yale’s Collegiate Gothic buildings appeared to be melting in front of me. 

It is hard to imagine anyone conceiving of La Sagrada Família, which in places also seems to be melting, without the aid of LSD. (There are persistent, false rumors that Gaudí took magic mushrooms.)

However he did it, Gaudi was a visionary. While the Sagrada Família is his crowning achievement, nearby Casa Mila, with its undulating façade, dreamy Art Nouveau interior apartments, and, again, trippy rooftop sculptures, offers a secular and somewhat human-scale exposure to his genius.

Casa Mila (1912)

With Joe at Notre Dame, 2004

But human scale was never the point of any ambitious European monument to God. As anyone who took Art History 101 knows, the idea was subjugation—to put man in his place, assert divine hierarchy, and induce worship.

It is not my religious affiliation (Jew-ish) but the hubris of believing in myself that has kept me from fully appreciating religious architecture for all these years. 

I could say the same thing about the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem. I am moved by it but don’t relate to the devout davening and self-subordination one witnesses there. I cannot reconcile belief in oneself and the power of individuality with the conformity and diminishment these places of worship bring on. Alas, I am not the worshipping kind. 

It has taken me since 1978, when I first set foot in Notre Dame, to understand this dissonance. I can respect these great cathedrals’ lofty designs without subscribing to the diminution of self they induce.

Jamb statues, Notre Dame 

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