Sicut Sol Inter Astra

On April 15, 2019, about a month ago, the Cathedral of Notre-Dame burned in Paris. I’d just finished teaching for the day when I heard the news. I opened my phone, and saw a text from my dad: “Notre Dame (Cathedral) is burning down.”

I was in a daze. In my Latin III class, we’d just finished reading from Ovid’s opening invocation in the Metamorphoses: in nova fert animus mutatas dicere formas corpora (1.1–2). (In Arthur Golding’s sonorous sixteenth-century rendering: “Of shapes transformde to bodies straunge, I purpose to entreate.”)

I’d planned for us to read from the Myth of Echo and Narcissus the next day. But it felt so strange to continue on the same path, as if Notre-Dame hadn’t just burned the night before. Could I do more?

Latin literature — any literature, for that matter — can seem timeless, reaching out and imposing itself in our current moment. But when the moment calls out and begs instead for timeliness, where should we look?

It’s not an easy question, and there’s no easy answer. But I’ve come to expect that timely Latin can come from unexpected places. In this case, I found the words for the Great Fire at Notre-Dame not in antiquity, but in the near-contemporary report on the Cathedral from a little-known medieval author.

Almost 700 years ago, in 1323, John of Jandun, a medieval scholastic philosopher and interpreter of Averroes and Aristotle (notably a contemporary and associate of the medieval political philosopher Marsilius of Padua), composed an encomium to the new cathedral in Paris in his Tractatus de laudibus Parisius.

I came across the Tractatus the night of the fire, when a simple Google search led me to an English translation on a conference website (Michael T. Davis’s excellent translation, presented at the 2005 Triennial Neil J. O’Brien Symposium in Medieval Studies at Rice University: “The Late Medieval City: Architecture and Urbanism”). I quickly found the Latin reproduced in an article in Gesta, and got to work adapting it for my high school students.

My eyes glided over the Latin, and I came across this (my translation follows below):

Inter quas [ecclesias Parisienses] illa terribilissima gloriosissime Virginis Dei genitricis Marie ecclesia non immerito, sicut sol inter astra, prefulget.

Among the churches of Paris, the Church of the most glorious Virgin Mary, Mother of God, surely the most aweful (terribilissima), shines brilliantly, as a sun among stars.

When I read this, I stopped. I couldn’t help but think of the images I’d seen of the blaze, uncontrolled, devouring the roof and the spire, pitched against a hazy Paris sunset. Notre-Dame had become terrible. It was affecting — eerie, even — to read these words in conjunction with the day’s images so present in my mind.

So Notre-Dame made us tremble on April 15, 2019. But why was it “terrible” for Jandun? Jandun could have used venerabilissima, ornatissima, pulcherrima — yet he chooses terribilissima. According to Lewis and Short, terribilis came to mean “demanding reverence, venerable” in late Latin, but it seems Jandun — just a few decades after its construction — might have been trying to capture Notre-Dame’s peculiar “awe-ful” power to impose on us, to shake us, to not leave us alone. To make us tremble. With or without physical fire, it touches us with an internal one.

In the eighteenth century, Edmund Burke famously drew a distinction between the “Beautiful” and the “Sublime” in his famous Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful: the Beautiful arises from pleasure, the Sublime, from pain (part III, section 27). In the Nineteenth Century, John Ruskin, directly following in the Burkean tradition and the German Romantic one that followed it, summarizes the position aptly in his Seven Lamps of Architecture, where he discusses the “Lamp of Power” in architecture:

It will generally happen that [beautiful works of architecture] fall into two broad classes: the one characterized by an exceeding preciousness and delicacy, to which we recur with a sense of affectionate admiration; and the other by a severe, and in many cases mysterious, majesty, which we remember with an undiminished awe, like that felt at the presence and operation of some great Spiritual Power. (57)

Predating Ruskin by some 500 years, did Jandun mean to bring attention to the presence of “some great Spiritual Power” — a “severe” majesty — at Notre-Dame by his using terribilissima? Was he calling it sublime?

It surely seems so — especially if we turn to a Latin text with which Jandun would have been most familiar: the Vulgate Bible. In a stirring example in Genesis 28:17, just after Jacob’s dream of the Ladder into Heaven, Jerome’s Vulgate reads:

Pavensque, “Quam terribilis,” inquit, “est locus iste! non est hic aliud nisi domus Dei et porta caeli!”

And he was afraid, and said, “How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.” (NRSV)

Jacob called the holy place he had come upon Bethel. Jandun called the holy place he had come upon Notre-Dame.

This aforementioned sentence — where Jandun remarks on the exceeding glory and “terror” of Notre-Dame in comparison to all other Parisian churches — convinced me of this text’s continuing relevance for young readers. I knew it would have an impact on my students.

That night, I finished writing up two graded summaries of Jandun’s piece. (I had two sections — one of Latin I, one of Latin III. I wanted to share Jandun with both.)

On April 16, 2019, I slowly read his words aloud with my students — step by step we established the meanings of unfamiliar words (often Medieval or Ecclesiastical); meanwhile, I projected selections from the Tractatus to the front of the room with photographs of Notre-Dame; before and after, resplendent, and ruined.

Then we came upon Jandun’s closing exclamation, which I reproduce here in full and unadapted (again, my translation follows):

O quam salubres in illis oratoriis Deo potentissimo preces fundunt, cum spiritales et interne puritates ipsorum precantium corporalibus et externis oratoriorum munditiis proportionaliter correspondent!

O quam placide omnipotentissimo Deo in illis tabernaculis laudes canuntur, cum ipsorum corda canentium sunt amenis tabernaculorum picturis analogice virtutibus venustata!

O quam acceptabilia gloriosissimo Deo super hec altara holocausta parantur, cum ipsorum sacrificantium vita, correspondente deauratione altarium claritate, resplendet! (Inglis 78)

O how salutary are the prayers that pour out in those oratories to God most-powerful, when the inner, spiritual purities of the worshippers correspond proportionally to the corporal, external ornaments of the sanctuary!

O how gentle are those praises sung to God omnipotent in those tabernacles, when the hearts themselves of the singers are beautified in harmony with the portraits in the sanctuaries!

O how agreeable to God most glorious are sacrifices prepared on those altars, when the life of the priest himself shines with a gilded brilliance equal to that of the altar!

Jandun’s Latin sparkled; it glinted in a new light, refracted through the dark glass of history, into the eyes and ears of students trying to make sense of the tragedy.

I remember the delight on my students’ faces when they realized it was Latin, and not French, in which de Jandun chose to express himself in the Tractatus de laudibus Parisius. We sometimes forget how for our students — most of whom aren’t particularly drawn to knowledge of Latin’s millennia-long history — this can be a moment of revelation. Latin is a language in which real people — relatable people, from all across history — chose to express themselves, to be understood. And not always in neo-classical modes: Tractatus de laudibus Parisius isn’t a treatise of imitation — there’s no invocation of the Muses or an attempt to make Notre-Dame into a new Pantheon — rather, Jandun talks about his lived experience of the power and beauty of Notre-Dame in Latin he meant to be understood by his peers.

I remember that night I heard a newscaster say (though many newscasters repeated the sentiment) that Notre-Dame was more than a place of Catholic Christian worship. Rather, it was a human monument for the whole world: “A symbol on which to place our greatest hopes.” So, too, for Latin. Its architecture — like Notre-Dame’s — became the kind of thing people used (and use!) to pin up their hopes, dreams, worries, frustrations, ideas, desires. For thousands of years it was a language in whose architecture men and women around the world expressed their everyday cares and their innermost thoughts. And, of course, through the Mass and the influence of the Catholic Church, it gave to millions of people a nearly universal language of prayer. In this case — Jandun gives us a walking tour of the most beautiful sights in Paris not in his mother tongue, but in Latin.

So for about half an hour, one of those people, John of Jandun, reached out to us — a high school Latin teacher and about a dozen students — as we read his words. He told us about his Notre-Dame as we now looked on ours, changed forever. He spoke, we listened; he exclaimed, we heard. We traded passage for photograph until we’d finished.

There then was reverent silence.

In nova fert animus mutatas dicere formas corpora . . .

[For those interested in pursuing these topics further: the Latin text used here for the Tractatus de Laudibus Parisius —which is odd in places, including the title — is from the appendix of Erik Inglis’s Gesta article, which, in turn, derives from Paris et ses historiens, Le Roux de Lincy and Tisserand, eds., 44, 46, 48 (Paris, 1867). For some excellent recent scholarship on the sublime (in the work of Kant and Schopenhauer, in particular), see Sandra Shapshay, “The Problem and Promise of the Sublime: Lessons from Kant and Schopenhauer” in Suffering Art Gladly (Palgrave MacMillan 2014) and her entry on “Schopenhauer’s Aesthetics” in the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2018).]

Evan Dutmer teaches Latin at the Culver Academies, a boarding school in Northern Indiana. He is also a PhD candidate in Ancient Philosophy at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.