Snobbish though it may sound, and to that extent exactly contrary to the faith in humility it is supposed to be linked with, I declare I have a favorite church in the world: it is the National Cathedral in Washington DC. The killing detail —the snobbish touch—is that I live about 4,000 miles away. It is out of question that I attend every Sunday service.
Switching from snobbish to candid, I acknowledge that I like everything in it. There is My attraction undoubtedly religious: the richness of the rite, the wonderfully witty sermons, the mix of a cordial atmosphere in the worship and of a very insistent formality typical of Lutheran rituals create a special atmosphere. The attraction of a discreet political context is not neglectable either: I enjoy the politically correct praise of human rights at the entrance and the Yankee praise of Lincoln just past it on the left. The right hand rises to emphasize the eternally silent words of an unknown speech, while the left one, is opened, by the leg, and for this reason reachable by the public. People have taken the habit of shaking it, as shown by the worn out aspect of the dark bronze polished to a golden nuance by the numerous touches. There is irony in this, even a double one: it is an irony that Episcopalians spontaneously reinvented the cult of the saints that Protestantism repudiated in the very heart of their worship place; it is another irony (or maybe just a fairly balanced compensation) that it is a lay saint. Every time I have had a chance to stop by DC on a Sunday, I make sure that I would make it to the Cathedral, a trip which is also a wonderful reminder of my love for my wife, as she is the one who took me there for the first time (overcoming some reticence I had), and with whom I have visited every time since then.
Another thing that I like is the quite impressive aspect to the place. It is, I believe, a common reaction in front of the grandeur of the building, which is built like a Medieval Cathedral. But strangely enough, I do not feel completely at ease in my liking. Perhaps out of unconscious manifestation of good taste, I suspect it to be influenced by a kitschy sense of repetition as the cathedral is exactly what we expect a cathedral to be. The building is of a classical, medieval, gothic style, the “flamboyant” type, and everything, the decorations, the carving of the stones, the columns, mimics the middle Ages. It is desperately non innovative in its outside, visible, features. One must wonder why modern creativity in architecture has been ignored and a pattern that was designed over a thousand years ago was preferred. For sure, modern cathedrals exist: the (catholic) cathedral of Evry (France) is a monument of modernity. The fact is that I am not overly impressed by Evry and I am impressed by Washington. I do not think it is religious partiality on my side, as I grew up as a catholic, and the most beautiful churches for me are the Roman ones (hence, not the Gothic ones which inspired the National Cathedral). So I like something that my mind and my taste at their best tell me I should not. Mystery.
The time of reconciliation with the National Cathedral dawned on me in an unexpectedly intellectual fashion when I linked its millennial brand new architecture with—I hardly dare reckon this—with a concept. It is a concept that I have both used and carefully mistrusted at the same time in my intellectual production: this concept is the one of “long run” in history.
The notion of the “long run” was crafted to fight a traditional approach based on the narrative of events considered as key in historical intelligibility. The “long run” perspective on the contrary considers that an event is just the surface of a deeper move—and if it has any interest it is just in the context of this larger understanding. So, something that we could consider as being a “historical fact” in itself is in reality tied to other facts which may be centuries far from it that make it intelligible.
I have myself used this approach in my own specialization—the history of ideas—to explain concepts such as citizenship which stay stable between the antiquity and modern democracies, which, apparently have hardly to do as regards to broad political structures, time, civilization etc. Despite my own situation, I have always dig in the “long run” with a certain reticence, as I have always wondered how it was that there are things which are transformed so totally at a fast pace while others seem to keep a consistence that goes literally through millenniums.
The answer—the miraculous answer?—came precisely in the National Cathedral when I realized that it was a material illustration of my reflections about the intellectual history. The Cathedral is the proof—the empirical proof so to say—that there is a historical stability that sparkles across civilizations and regimes, conceptions and material organization, and pushes us to keep as the ultimate reference forms that were invented far away in the past. These forms can be material like a church or intellectual like old habits and ways of thoughts—forms of thoughts. And for this, I felt the right to be comfortable both in dealing with the long run in intellectual history and at the Cathedral in my worshiping.
