Notre Dame of Paris. Allan Temko.

Notre Dame of Paris
Allan Temko
New York: Time, Inc. Book Division. 1952

Why read it? Nonfiction. This book re-creates for the reader the world in which Notre Dame Cathedral was built. Construction of the Cathedral occurred because of the extraordinary faith of the people of its time—the world which Henry Adams describes as a unified society built around the Catholic religion and the universal love for the Virgin Mary. To read this book is to engage actively in the construction of one of the world’s great monuments to faith. It is also an outstanding work of art.

Sample Ideas from the Book. Henry Adams: The uniqueness of the Middle ages was not in their courts or castles or battles but in their cathedrals. Temko’s central theme: the genius of the age and the sweat of its people were poured into the cathedral until it became the climactic achievement of medieval Paris. Notre Dame is never boring. Built by a superb common effort in which the entire community took part, the manual laborer as well as the master artist, the serf and the villein as well as the merchant and the prince. Notre Dame possesses the variety of life itself. The communal Middle Ages when men as at few moments in history enjoyed their joint capacity to create. There is no waste—the first crime in architecture as in other arts.

Nothing haphazard in the construction of the cathedral. No project on the grand order has been more lucidly conceived and executed. Architects changed and bishops, but the grand original design of Maurice de Sully remained dominant. The typical cathedral was built in less than 100 years. The earliest known use of the device called the flying buttress, which, like most great inventions, emerged in several regions almost simultaneously. Notre Dame cannot be conceived as standing otherwise or in any other place; the site, climate, the amount of light in the air, the materials available, are all part of great construction; the same Master Builder would have built a different church at Reims and Amiens.

For Mary knows not how to judge, but only to forgive. In the Virgin’s code of justice there was no punishment, but only pardon. It was for the love of Mary that the entire community of medieval Paris joined to create the cathedral in her honor. Mary lifted and civilized the entire Western world; in an era of continual male brutality, her emblem, the rose, became the sign of the less brutal woman.

Quote. “Notre Dame depicts nothing less than the whole natural universe as it was known at the start of the thirteenth century.”

Quote. Corbusier: “A cathedral is a difficult problem ingeniously solved.”