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The Notre Dame of Paris

Quotes

From [Temko, Pp. 157, 159]

THe WEester Facade and the Conquest of Normandy - 1204

From here prodigious height, poised on the balustrade before
the western rose, so remote and inaccessible that she seems to
glance downward from Dante's Heaven, the Rose of the World,
the Virgin, stands flanked by angels. Her won, a baby, is
cradled against her shoulder and is much too young to be
concerne3d with the capital [Paris] below; but, the Mother, 
who clearly has a predilection for Paris, points out its curiosities to the Child never-the-less, with a grave but delighted interest. surely Paris must still please here, else she would rise up with her escort of
angels, and fly staightaway to Lourdes, and remain there hidden in the grotto. bu, the Virgin keeps her high perch at Notre-Dame, exposed to sun and rain and the sind; and although, over sever centuries, her image has repeastedly weatered away, so that the prsetn Mary is modern, the status has always been replaced.
The Virgin has never concealeed herself from Paris, no matter what grief the city has caused her. For Mary knows not how to judge, but only to forgiv e; and if Paris has more or less forgotten her, she has not forgotten the Paris of the Middle QAge.
... 
[P. 159]
Then [then, 1200 AD,] was the bewildering Paris, so intesely devoted to the Virgin,
which created one of the most lucid constuctions of the Middle Age: The wester facade of Notre-Dame. And only if the Cathedral is approached through its maze of strets may the great unifying wall be understood.

The front of the churche is the summa [Latin: height of]  of medieval Paris: THe toal, ideal image of the society which challenged Heaven with its superlative faith and which, from the casting of the facade's foundations before 1200 to the completi0n of the towers in 1250, made Heaven yield.

Unlike the Summa Theologica of Saitn Thomas Aquinas, which belongs with it historically, the facades was finithsed by its builders. More-over -- what the closely written quarto vaolumes of Aquinas could not hope for -- the facade is still taken seriously by ordinary people an d not merely by scholars and priests. After seven hundred years of hard use and considerable misfortune, the wall stands erect and conquerable, with the broad, lifting strenght of the Gothic Trumpl.

[Temko, Pp. 157, 159]




Refs


Temko, Allan (1955). Notre-Dame of Paris.
       The Viking Press, NY.
       DD: 726-T279N