Notre-Dame, resurrected by the genius of French craftsmanship, is as beautiful as it was before the fire that ravaged it five years earlier.
Yet, I cannot shake the image of the cathedral in flames from my mind. It keeps overlapping with the present image of the restored structure, like a manifestation of traumatic memory or a return of the repressed.
One of the last great popes spoke of the “splendor of truth” that alone saves and sets us free. As long as this truth remains unspoken, the psychological wounds linked to the persistence of the trauma will continue to bleed into the soul of the people who have been lied to. A people treated like a child, shielded from the truth under the pretense of protecting them from the cruelty of the world, but in doing so, traumatized—because the child intuits the horror hidden from their awareness, the horror of living under the authority of liars and perverts who distort reality for their own gain. Thus, the world appears to them as an unreal spectacle, a universe of false appearances where, to use Debord’s phrase, even the truth itself becomes a moment of the false.
An infantilized people will believe in nothing, for it will be the reign of lies. In a mystical sense, one could call it the reign of Satan.
And civilization will be poised to descend into chaos.
As the leaders of the world’s great powers gathered beneath the nave, now more desacralized, instrumentalized, and alienated to the realm of utility than ever before, one can read in this great conspiracy to destroy the truth a harbinger of the tragic times ahead.
Truth has been sacrificed on the altar of social cohesion. Yet it is possible that a fortuitous incident may force it to emerge abruptly and unpredictably, shedding light on the darkness of events.
That will be the time of revelations, as well as revolutions—the moment believers call the apocalypse.
In short, perhaps one day we will finally learn who started that damned arson, whose obvious malice stares us all in the face.
